The Springhill families waited more than half a century for what should never have required an inquest to say: that their dead were not lawful targets, not threats, not unfortunate collateral in a “clean” military operation, but civilians killed by Crown Forces in West Belfast. On 9 July 1972, five people were shot dead in the Springhill and Westrock area: Margaret Gargan, David McCafferty, John Dougal, Patrick Butler and Fr Noel Fitzpatrick. In April 2026, the coroner found that the soldiers had lost control, used unreasonable force, breached even the British Army’s own rules for lethal force and concluded that the killings were unjustified.
That finding was not merely a legal event. It was a restoration of names against the machinery of official forgetting. Westminster speaks of “legacy” as if it were a matter of legislative design, commissions, safeguards, processes, restrictions, protections and amendments. In West Belfast, legacy is far from an abstraction. It is a child, a priest, a mother, a father, a teenager, a family, a mural, a grave and a community that remembers while the British Government has every reason to forget.
Margaret Gargan was thirteen years old. She was not a combatant, not a danger to anyone, not a footnote in a British security briefing, but a child speaking with friends on a summer evening in West Belfast. She was shot in the head by a British soldier. The coroner found that she posed no threat.
Fr Noel Fitzpatrick was a curate at Corpus Christi parish. He went out not as a fighter, but as a priest, holding a white flag, moving towards danger in the ordinary Christian duty of attending to the wounded and the dying. Patrick Butler, a Belfast Corporation refuse worker and father of six, was killed alongside him as they attempted to cross a road. The inquest found that both men posed no threat and should not have been shot.
David McCafferty was fifteen. The inquest heard that he had been a member of Na Fianna Éireann, but found that he was unarmed, not engaged in offensive activity and should not have been shot. He was hit in the back while trying to retrieve Fr Noel Fitzpatrick’s body. Whether or not he was a Fian, it did not turn an unarmed fifteen-year-old boy into a target for a British soldier’s bullet.
John Dougal was sixteen. The coroner found that the circumstances before his death remained unclear, but that he too should not have been shot.
Springhill did not stand alone in the memory of West Belfast. A year earlier, during the Ballymurphy massacre of August 1971, members of the Parachute Regiment killed civilians in the days following the introduction of internment. The later inquest found that the dead were entirely innocent and that the use of force had been unjustified. No weapons were recovered from any of those killed.
Joan Connolly was a mother of eight. She had once welcomed British soldiers into her home and served them tea, coffee and sandwiches, believing their presence might help keep the peace. That small act of ordinary hospitality makes her killing all the more bitter. Months later, during the Ballymurphy massacre, she was shot dead by the Parachute Regiment. Her daughter Briege Voyle later dismissed Boris Johnson’s apology made decades later as meaningless without truth, asking: “Our loved ones were all completely innocent, so why were they shot?”
Even before Ballymurphy and Springhill, there had been the Falls Curfew. In July 1970, the British Army sealed off the Lower Falls, searched homes, imposed a curfew and killed four civilians. They were Charles O’Neill, William Burns, Patrick Elliman and Zbigniew Uglik. The operation wounded many more and left behind another set of names still carried in local memory long after British officialdom had moved to its next justification.
The killing of civilians by Crown Forces in Belfast, including of children, continued in the following decade. Carol Ann Kelly was twelve years old, from Twinbrook in the Colin area of West Belfast. At her funeral, a priest described her as “kind, gentle, and always smiling and laughing”. She had gone to a local shop and was walking back towards her home at Cherry Park when a plastic bullet fired by a British soldier struck her on the head. She died three days later, on 22nd May 1981. To Westminster, such deaths become “legacy”. To her family and community, she remains a child murdered on her way home.
This is part of why the language of legacy so often offends. It takes the intimate and makes it procedural. It takes the dead of the Six Counties and converts them into material for Westminster management. The word “legacy” itself is not false, but it is soulless. It does not reflect the memories of streets sealed off by soldiers, homes raided, bodies lying where they fell, empty seats at the dinner table or mothers waiting decades for a court to say what they already knew.
Within days of the Springhill findings, British politics provided a grim illustration of the same hierarchy of memory. Kemi Badenoch apologised after footage from Bloody Sunday was used in a Conservative social media clip criticising Labour’s legacy legislation and defending British veterans of the conflict. She said she had not approved the video, despite appearing in it and despite its being posted on her social media accounts. She blamed young staff who had not recognised the footage. Her apology did not exhaust the meaning of its creation and publication.
The issue was not simply that a mistake had been made by inexperienced staff. The issue was that Irish civilian death could become background scenery in a British argument about British soldiers. In the same week that Springhill families heard a coroner confirm that their loved ones should not have been shot, footage from another British Army massacre was used in a political attack framed around the protection of veterans. The timing was obscene because it was revealing.
This is the hierarchy of imperial memory. Irish dead are to be contextualised, and eventually closed. The forces of the Crown are to be protected from the consequences of that memory. The victims may receive apology, recognition or mealy-mouthed words of sympathy, but only within a framework still controlled by a foreign state whose forces killed them.
That hierarchy was visible again when Keir Starmer apologised on behalf of the British Government to the Springhill families. The apology was long overdue and, for the families, no doubt significant. But an apology delivered more than half a century after the killings and only after relatives had forced the truth through an inquest process, cannot be mistaken for justice. It confirms the same grim arrangement that the British state kills Irish people on Irish soil, denies, delays and then reserves to itself the authority to apologise when the facts can no longer be contained.
The so-called “Troubles Bill” sits inside that same struggle over memory. Labour’s Bill is designed to repeal and replace parts of the Conservative Legacy Act, create a reformed Legacy Commission and introduce new arrangements for dealing with unresolved cases. The Government in Westminster presents it as a fairer system for families seeking answers, while also stressing protections and safeguards for veterans.
That tension tells its own story. Even when Westminster reforms legacy law, it does so as Westminster. It still claims the authority to decide how the dead are investigated, how the past is processed and how much discomfort former soldiers should be asked to bear. The old Conservative approach sought to draw a line under the past through immunity and closure. Labour’s new approach is different in form and in some respects less crude, but it remains trapped inside the exact same imperial assumption that the British state is to design the very systems through which its own violence is remembered and judged.
For the families, the matter is simpler and harder. Without inquests, campaigns, lawyers, relatives, witnesses and stubborn local memory, the official record remains polluted by many of the old excuses: crossfire, confusion, threat, context, pressure, fog. The Springhill inquest did not restore the dead. It did not return Margaret Gargan to childhood, Fr Noel Fitzpatrick to his parish, Patrick Butler to his family, David McCafferty to his youth or John Dougal to the life he was denied. But it stripped away part of the lie.
That is why these processes matter. Not because justice arrives whole and pure from the institutions of the Crown, it never does, but because even limited truth can be wrestled from them. The British state does not merely kill, deny and delay. It then writes the rules by which the killing, denial and delay may be remembered. Every successful family campaign disrupts that arrangement.
West Belfast knows this better than most places. The Lower Falls, Ballymurphy, Springhill and Twinbrook are not merely locations in the history of the conflict. They are communities where the language of “legacy” has names and faces. They are places where murals are not decorative politics, but acts of resistance against erasure. They are reminders that memory is not neutral when the belligerent state has an interest in forgetting.
Before legacy is a bill, a commission, an amendment or a Westminster row, it is a mother of eight in Ballymurphy. It is a thirteen-year-old girl in Springhill. It is a priest moving towards the wounded. It is a twelve-year-old child from Twinbrook walking home from a shop. It is a family sitting through decades of denial because the state that killed their loved one also wished to manage the meaning of the killing.
That is why Springhill matters now. That is why Ballymurphy still matters. That is why Carol Ann Kelly’s name remains firmly in the memory of Twinbrook. The political class in Westminster may seek to manage the past, but West Belfast remembers its dead as people, rather than as subjects of British procedure.
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