Richard McIlkenny: Richard McIlkenny, who has died aged 72, spent 16 years in jail for an IRA crime he did not commit, the biggest murder in British history at the time.
Sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of the 21 people who died in the Birmingham pub bombings, he and the five others convicted largely on the basis of confessions beaten out of them protested their innocence from the outset, and became the centre of a campaign to overturn the convictions.
The two bombs on November 21st, 1974 killed and injured so many that scores of taxis were used to ferry victims to the city's overwhelmed hospitals. A mood of national outrage prompted emergency measures described by the home secretary of the day, Roy Jenkins, as draconian.
The bombings and their outcome showed IRA and British authorities alike in stark and unflattering light: the toll of injustice on those wrongly arrested and their families resembled that on the bereaved and injured. For men from poor Irish working-class emigrant background, becoming the "Birmingham Six" was a cruel celebrity. Kate McIlkenny spoke this week of her husband's difficulties after prison, the heavy drinking and mental breakdown which followed. "It never seemed to leave him throughout the 15 remaining years of his life," she said. "Richard was a great person, but you couldn't really expect anyone to get over such an ordeal."
As the Six were released in 1991 he said into the waiting microphones: "We've waited a long time for this - 16 years because of hypocrisy and brutality - but every dog has its day and we're going to have ours."
He had written several eloquent letters from jail to campaigners outside. But unlike several of the others who continued to campaign in various ways he shunned publicity after release.
He was born in the Bone, the small and poor north Belfast district beside Ardoyne, spent four years in the Irish Army and was proud of serving as "a three-star private cook" in the Officers' Mess, before being discharged on compassionate grounds when his father had a stroke.
He tried to find work in Belfast but left for Birmingham in 1956. In 1974 he and Johnny Walker were the only two of the "Birmingham Six" with steady jobs in a factory, McIlkenny as a millwright.
The men walked into history after a day spent drinking around the city's pubs, trying to raise the money to go to Belfast for the funeral of James McDade. Like most of them from north Belfast, he was known to them chiefly as a pub singer, but had blown himself up trying to place an IRA bomb at a Coventry telephone exchange 10 days before.
It was one of nine explosive devices placed in and around Birmingham that month: most failed to explode.
In the previous month IRA bombs had killed seven and injured many more in bars near army barracks in Guildford and Woolwich.
Birmingham was tense even before the pub bombs exploded, McDade's body was at the airport under police guard while relatives tried to get an airline to take the coffin. McIlkenny and the others varied in their republican sympathies but McDade was from Ardoyne, and McIlkenny, like several of the others, had known the family all his life. He was going to Belfast for the funeral but also to visit his family, with a list of shopping for Kate: soda bread, potato bread, sausages, vegetable roll.
Four of the six men made confessions after ill-treatment in custody. Much of the final court case hinged on a statement McIlkenny had always said was largely fabricated by police.
Though much else in the crown case was also flawed, forensic tests unavailable in the 1970s eventually proved the fabrication.
This week's obituary of McIlkenny in the London Times noted that the bombing "exposed the savagery of the IRA's methods, but would also expose the ineptitude and casual anti-Irish sentiment endemic in the British Establishment".
The IRA has never admitted responsibility, though 11 years later Joe Cahill said in a television film that "the volunteers who did carry out those operations are freely walking about today."
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams said on the 30th anniversary of the Birmingham bombs that he regretted "what happened and I make no bones about that".
Outrage at the bombing campaign in England produced several other spectacular miscarriages of justice, senior judges in repeated failed appeals insisting that original verdicts must stand.
Even to allow the possibility that the police evidence against the Birmingham Six was questionable would open up the "appalling vista" that the men might appeal or be pardoned, Master of the Rolls Lord Justice Denning famously concluded in 1977, ruling against the prisoners suing for injury in police custody.
They were freed only in 1991, the basis for their convictions thoroughly discredited.
The bitter aftermath of the bombing deterred early support from Irish government quarters and others, including the Catholic Church in England.
When McIlkenny died of cancer this week in a Dublin hospital, he was surrounded by the family who fled Birmingham in the anti-Irish hysteria that followed the bombing.
With Kate and several of their children he had settled in Celbridge, Co Kildare. Underpinning famous supporters and tireless lawyers, family networks sustained the Birmingham Six.
His daughters, Kate and his brother, Paddy, campaigned for years on Richard McIlkenny's behalf. There were 25 mourners at one point around his hospital bed.
Richard McIlkenny, born December 22nd, 1933, died May 21st, 2006.