Part of the painful legacy of the conflict in the Northern Ireland is an ongoing failure to provide truth and accountability to bereaved families.
Thousands of people were killed during the 1969-1998 conflict, many of them children. Stephen McConomy was 11 years old when he was shot and killed by a British soldier in Derry in 1982. Stephen was playing on the street with some friends on the evening of Friday, April 16. Suddenly, a flap opened on a nearby British army vehicle with four soldiers inside, and Lance Corporal Nigel Englefield of the Royal Anglian Regiment shot Stephen in the back of the head with a lethal plastic bullet from close range.
Stephen suffered devastating, lethal injuries.
The McConomy family has spent decades looking for answers about Stephen’s death. On Saturday, I spoke at an event alongside Stephen’s brother Emmett and his cousin Caoili O’Doherty, and Paul O’Connor of the human rights organization the Pat Finucane Centre, at the Museum of Free Derry (MoFD) a couple of hundred yards from where Stephen was killed.
“The police didn’t investigate his death to the standards that we would have expected when a child has been shot and killed,” Emmett explained.
The Pat Finucane Centre has spent many years investigating the killing, and discovered in previously declassified documents significant concern among scientists at the time about the lethality of plastic bullets. Stephen was the eleventh victim of the weapon, the sixth child to be killed by a plastic bullet during the conflict.
The NGO discovered memos from the 1980s detailing correspondence between scientists and the British Ministry of Defense where the scientist pointed out that a plastic bullet with a kinetic force of anything more than 50 joules was potentially lethal, and that the British army plastic bullets had a force of 216 joules. There were also widespread concerns that the guns being used by the British military to fire plastic bullets were inherently and dangerously faulty.
This and other correspondence is featured in the pamphlet detailing Stephen’s death written by researcher Stuart Ross for the Pat Finucane Centre and released at Saturday’s event. A Young Life Cut Short outlines what happened to the boy, and the family’s struggle since in trying to secure answers about why Stephen was killed.
That no one has been held accountable for Stephen’s death does not come as a great surprise. I represented Human Rights First on an independent panel of international experts investigating State impunity during the conflict. Stephen’s killing was one of the cases featured in our 2024 report Bitter Legacy. In 1999, Human Rights First (then known at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) was advocating in the U.S. Congress that plastic bullets should be banned,.
Up to the end of 1981, the British army had been responsible for 236 killings in Northern Ireland. Only eleven prosecutions had arisen from these killings, resulting in just two convictions for manslaughter, giving rise to a suspended sentence and a one-year prison term. As our report notes, since then there has been continued widespread, systematic and systemic impunity for State forces.
Bitter Legacy found that “families have been particularly distressed by the common tactic of blaming the victims for their own deaths in order to justify the use of violence against them.”
Emmett said Stephen’s death “should be independently investigated … and, if the evidence meets the legal standard, as we believe it does, there should be a prosecution. Our mother died without knowing the truth about what happened that day to her child. Our family want an independent investigation…We are seeking truth and justice. It is through this healing process that our family can move forward.”
Stephen’s cousin Caoili O’Doherty is also Curatorial Assistant for the North West Civil Rights Archive at the MoFD. She explained how Stephen’s death continues to affect younger generations of the family, born after he was killed.
“For many families who had people killed during that time, there has been a painful culture of silence where what happened wasn’t talked about,” she said. “But in our family these things were explained to us from a young age, in ways we could understand. We were told about what happened, about the name of the soldier who killed Stephen, how a photo of Stephen dying in hospital was smuggled out. The injustice done to our family and others is what drives some of us from a younger generation to carry on this work.”
