"I WAS questioned and insulted and called a thick Irish Mick. I was struck on the face several times, which broke my teeth, and asked repeatedly to sign a statement saying I was at the farm robbing it . . . I was disturbed by the night staff every half hour. The meals I received were liberally dosed with salt and I was refused a drink. In the end I had to cup my hands in the lavatory basin and flush the toilet to get a drink of water."
The words of Pat Molloy, who was born in Mayo in 1928 and died in Gartree Prison in 1981, serving a sentence for a crime he did not commit. We know now that it was Molloy's false confession, beaten out of him by the West Midlands, Police, which led to three other innocent men serving 18 years for the murder of 13 year old Carl Bridgewater in 1978.
Paul Foot, who campaigned tirelessly for the men's release, described Molloy as "a gentle man and a skilful carpenter". He had a drink problem and had committed small burglaries, but had always refused to take part in anything that might involve violence. The detectives investigating Carl Bridgewater's murder identified him as the weakest and most vulnerable of those who had been arrested.
They boasted openly that they would "break" him - and they did. Much later, the foreman of the jury said that it was Molloy's confession which "held the case against the other men together. Without it there was nothing."
As this latest tragic miscarriage was, finally, admitted last week, the airwaves were loud with reassurances that such a thing could never, ever happen again in Britain. Safeguards have been put in place. The culture within the police is quite different.
Edward Crew, who is now Chief Constable of the West Midlands force, explained that "words like ethics and ethical behaviour didn't figure much in police practice back in the 1970s. They weren't actually important to us." Now all is changed. Ethical behaviour rules - OK.
BUT some things don't change, not if you're Irish and living in Britain. It is hard to imagine a more timely coincidence than the publication, within days of the release of the Bridgewater Three, of a report entitled The Irish Community: Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System.
Drawn up over the past eight months by a number of groups working in Britain - including the National Association of Probation Officers, the Bourne Trust and the Irish Commission for Prisoners Overseas - the report details how Irish people and those of Irish descent fare if they become enmeshed in the toils of the criminal justice system.
They are more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than members of any other ethnic group. They are also more likely to be arrested, to be remanded in custody, and given prison sentences longer than those officially recommended by the courts.
The authors have drawn on independent academic research and surveys carried out by organisations like the Probation Service, as well as on their own experience. These show, for example, that in one North London borough, 14.3 per cent of those stopped by the police in 1994 were Irish, while the figures for the Asian and Afro Caribbean communities were in the region of 4 per cent to 5 per cent, despite the fact that these two latter groups formed a higher proportion of the total population.
The pattern was repeated in Tony Blair's Islington, where 23 per cent of those stopped and questioned were Irish and where, according to a survey carried out for the Safer Cities Project, "the Irish community is deeply suspicious of the police and do not expect them to be even handed."
At the end, the writers give 56 case histories which put flesh on the bare and depressing statistics. Here, much abbreviated, are a few of them:
. Michael, aged 52, is from Waterford. He wanted to return home and relatives had organised a job and a ticket for him. He had the ticket in his pocket when he was picked up by the police in Victoria Station, singing. He was held in custody overnight and later admitted to a local hospital with severe bruising. He was not charged with any offence. He has not managed to make it home.
. Anna, aged 25, was leaving a pub with friends. They were stopped by two dozen police in three vans. She was searched in one van and a beer glass which she had taken from the pub was found. She was charged with theft, taken to the police station, strip searched and held overnight. Three police officers gave evidence against her but the magistrate dismissed the case.
. Pearse, aged 20, is from Co Kildare. He was found in the grounds of a college eating a pizza. The police accused him of breaking into the building but were unable to produce any evidence. He told them that he was unemployed and sleeping rough. He spent six months on remand for the alleged burglary before being acquitted.
THERE are dozens of similar cases. Some of them are much more serious. But all of these personal accounts raise questions as to why very many Irish people who come into contact with the law in Britain are subjected to intimidation and worse. Over and over again, what comes across is that the description of a person as "Irish" is deliberately intended to be pejorative.
This report has received very little attention, in spite of the coincidence of its being launched within days of yet another serious miscarriage of justice in Britain involving Irish people. There have been no questions in the Dail, no concerned editorials urging the Government to make representations to the British on behalf of Irish citizens who believe, with some reason, that they are being discriminated against because they are Irish.
It isn't hard to guess why. These people are emigrants, and emigration simply isn't an issue any more, or not one that politicians want to talk about. The good old emerald tiger economy is booming. We are constantly told that nobody has, to leave Ireland these days in order to find work. Look at all the emigrants coming home. We don't even call it emigration any more.
We've invented a new name to put an acceptable gloss on the old reality. The "Irish diaspora evokes IDA images of highly skilled young graduates, jetting off with their mobile phones to conquer the international money markets before bringing their skills back home.
Except that, as we know, some things don't change. I've written here before, to the point of yawn inducing boredom probably, about how we seem to have abandoned our emigrants, or at least those who leave for the drearily familiar reasons of unemployment and lack of opportunity. There are tens of thousands of them.
This report on one aspect of the contemporary emigrant experience is a salutary reminder of just how vulnerable many of them are, out there in the jungle. Surely, the emerald tiger is strong enough to care for all her cubs, those who are forced to go as well as those who stay at home.