Born: December 20th, 1944
Died: December 23rd, 2024
For most of his life Paddy Hill, who has died aged 80, radiated a fierce energy, passion and anger that was first manifest to the general public when he and the five others of the Birmingham Six had their bombing convictions overturned at the Old Bailey criminal court in London in 1991.
The six were arrested shortly after the Provisional IRA bombed two Birmingham pubs on November 21st 1974, killing 21 people and maiming and injuring more than 180. Hill and the five other co-accused were wrongfully convicted and each received 21 life sentences for the carnage perpetrated that day.
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With the rest of the Birmingham Six – Hugh Callaghan, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker – gathered around him outside the Old Bailey in March 1991 Hill declared with unrestrained vehemence that for 16-and-a-half years they had suffered as “political scapegoats”.
“The police told us from the start that they knew we hadn’t done it,” Hill thundered. “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.”
Hill carried that intensity of spirit for the remainder of his life, himself campaigning for other people falsely convicted through his Glasgow-based organisation, Mojo (Miscarriages of Justice Organisation) and also seeking to establish some semblance of justice for the victims and those bereaved by the IRA bombings at the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town pubs in Birmingham in 1974.
Hill was born in 1944 and raised in the nationalist Ardoyne area of north Belfast. His father and a brother served in the British army. With his father, and others of his family, he went to Birmingham for work in 1960, training as a painter, decorator and signwriter. During the 1960s he was regularly in trouble in the city, serving a number of short prison sentences for offences such as breaking and entering and brawling. He said that after he was released from a nine-month stretch in 1971 he “kept out of trouble”.
He went to school at the Holy Cross primary school in Ardoyne with James McDade, who in 1974 blew himself up while planting a bomb at the Coventry telephone exchange. With four others of the innocent men who would become known as the Birmingham Six, Hill decided to attend McDade’s funeral in Belfast, at the same time planning to visit a sick aunt in the city. The fateful trip coincided with the Birmingham bombings.
The five were arrested at Heysham in Lancashire as they were preparing to take the ferry to Belfast – the sixth man, Hugh Callaghan, was arrested the next day in Birmingham.
[ British government feared ‘tabloid scandal’ if it released Birmingham SixOpens in new window ]
The prosecution case rested on confessions made by four of the men – Hill and Gerard Hunter did not sign confessions; a subsequently discredited forensic test suggesting two of the men had handled explosives; the circumstantial evidence of their leaving Birmingham around the time of the bombings, and also of their drinking in pubs in the city frequented by suspected IRA members.
While evidence was provided that the confessions had been beaten out of the men by West Midlands police, and that the confessions had details wrong and were riddled with inconsistencies, they were convicted. Hill refused to do his time without resistance, estimating that of the 16-and-a-half years – mostly spent at Gartree Prison in Leicestershire – half of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 1983, while in prison, he was divorced from his wife Pat whom he married in 1966. Relations with his six children also were difficult.
The convictions of the six led to years of campaigning by people who were convinced of their innocence, including Sr Sarah Clarke; Fr Denis Faul; the solicitor Gareth Peirce, who represented the men; and journalist, and later Labour MP, Chris Mullin, who made a number of television programmes for Granada TV’s World in Action series seriously challenging the safety of the convictions. In March 1991, the convictions of the six were declared unsafe and quashed by the court of appeal, and the men released.
Mullin, in his investigations, said four IRA men were involved. He later identified two of the bombers as James Francis Gavin and Michael Murray, who are both dead, but has refused to identify a third man who admitted to him he was one of two men who planted the bombs in the two pubs, as he is still alive. Mullin said he was bound by journalistic confidentiality not to disclose the name of this man. In 2017, Michael Christopher Hayes from south Dublin told the BBC he was one of the group responsible for the bombings. He apologised but refused to name others involved because, he said, he was not an informer.
Hill said it was well known that Hayes was implicated and was dismissive of his apology, describing it as “an insult to the Birmingham families”, and “40 years too late”.
Three years earlier, in 2014, the year of the 40th anniversary of the bombings, Hill offered his support to the Justice4the21 campaign group for the bereaved families. This led to an unusual and initially fraught relationship with other leading campaigners, Brian and Julie Hambleton, whose 18-year-old sister Maxine was killed in the Birmingham bombings. Together with other victims, they have been long pressing for a public statutory inquiry into how and why no one has been brought to justice for the atrocity.
Earlier this month Julie Hambleton recalled first meeting Hill, remembering how she was so distressed she could hardly catch her breath and couldn’t talk, wondering was she “betraying” her sister and her mother by meeting the man who had been branded one of the bombers. “But it was the best thing we ever did because he kept every promise he ever made to us and more, and became one of our staunchest supporters,” she said. “We were like two souls aligned in search of the same thing, the truth.”
Hill produced a stack of material to help establish his innocence in the eyes of the Hambletons and introduced them to solicitor Gareth Peirce so that she also could assist their campaign.
Hill made the distinction that he was a republican but that what the IRA did was “diabolical”. “He wanted a united Ireland but did not agree with their methods,” Hambleton said. Of the IRA and the Birmingham Six, she said, “They allowed them to be locked away knowing full well that they didn’t do it. The old adage, with friends like that who needs enemies, couldn’t be more apt.”
[ Birmingham Six were furious with Haughey for not seeking their releaseOpens in new window ]
Hill is the third of the Birmingham Six to die. Richard McIlkenny died of cancer in 2006, aged 73. Hugh Callaghan died in 2023, aged 93.
As Julie Hambleton said, for the rest of his life Hill was “haunted” by the whole experience of his arrest, beatings, conviction and imprisonment. Psychiatrists who treated him said they had seldom dealt with anyone so traumatised.
But there was some solace to his life as well. In 2001 the six received compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million. Hill used some of that money as well as libel damages from a number of newspapers that persisted in arguing the six were guilty to set up Mojo. It supports other victims of miscarriages of justice and provides psychiatric counselling for those getting out of prison. It was at a fundraising event for Mojo that he met the artist Tara Babel, whom he married and who survives him.
Some years ago he told The Irish Times how marriage to Tara and looking after their “five horses, three ponies, three donkeys and a Shetland pony, three dogs and two cats” on their 20-acre holding in Ayrshire in Scotland gave him comfort and pleasure.