By Dave Vallely
“The police told us from the start that they knew we hadn’t done it. They told us they didn’t care who done it. They told us that they were going to frame us. Justice? I don’t think them people in there have got the intelligence or the honesty to spell the word, never mind dispense it. They’re rotten!”
This searing rebuke of the British justice system was delivered on the steps of the Old Bailey criminal court in London in 1991 by Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six who has died aged 80.
Paddy and five others were falsely imprisoned for 16-and-a-half years after being wrongly convicted for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the Provisional IRA, which killed 21 people and maimed and injured more than 180.
Paddy never submitted to this injustice and, as a result, estimated that he spent about half of his time imprisoned in solitary confinement. Subject to torture by the British State, it was only 18 years after his conviction was overturned that Paddy Hill finally won the right to two months of trauma counselling for the psychological damage he suffered while in prison.
“After almost a generation of being held hostage by my own government, I was suddenly thrown out onto the streets and expected to cope” he said.
Convinced that the freedom of the Birmingham Six was achieved by the people campaigning against their conviction rather than the system righting its own wrong, Paddy Hill dedicated the rest of his life to fighting injustices of the legal system. He set up Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (Mojo) to campaign on behalf of others falsely convicted and provide psychiatric counselling for those getting out of prison.
It’s in this capacity that he stood steadfast with the community of Jobstown in Tallaght, and three members of the Socialist Party, who were criminally pursued by the Irish State during the battle against the Water Charges on trumped-up charges over a protest in the community in 2014. Speaking in defence of the six defendants who were put on trial, Paddy declared that “justice is for us all, not just the rich and powerful.”
