FEATURES
College Tribune
19th February 2008
15
Confessing with a gun in his mouth Paddy Joe Hill of the Birmingham Six speaks to Caitrina Cody about being tortured, framed for murder and imprisoned for sixteen years On the 22nd of November, 1974, Paddy Joe Hill was sitting on a bench in a police station in the early hours of the morning, smoking a cigarette, and reading a book lent to him by one of the officers in the station; an Alistair McLean thriller called Bear Island that he’d read before. He had been called in to make a statement about his whereabouts on Friday the 21st of November, the day that two explosions shattered the peace of innercity Birmingham, destroying two pubs, the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern, and killing twenty-one people. As he sat on the hard bench, he wondered just how long this whole thing was going to take, and when he would finally be able to go and catch the ferry to Belfast with his five friends, whom he presumed would be waiting for him at the dock. Paddy’s reverie was disturbed when a shadow fell upon him. He looked up to meet the piercing glare of a police officer, whom he hadn’t seen before. The man approached the bench. He leaned right over him, and rubbing his hands. “Soon you little bastard, soon. You dirty little Irish fuck pig. You’re mine,” Sergeant Dunlop murmured, “You’ll find out soon enough what’s in store for you. You murdering cunt.” Earlier that Friday night, the six Northern Irishmen, who would soon become known to the world as the Birmingham Six, had caught the train to Heysham, playing cards on the way and catching up on each other’s news. Once there, they bought their ferry tickets. Paddy remembers the purpose of their journey, all those years ago, a journey that was to shape each of their destinies irrevocably. “The six of us were taking the boat to Belfast to go to the funeral of Jamesy McDaid. He’d blown himself up. He was an IRA man, make no mistake about that.” At this point, Paddy le his friends to check his luggage in and pass through security. “I walked up the gangplank, waited for the others in the bar, and got myself a pint. There was no sign of the others, and the next thing I knew, a constable was walking up to me, asking to speak to me. I had heard something about an explosion in Birmingham, it was on the TV in the bar, but I didn’t think anything of it. There were bombs going off all over England at the time – every other fucking day it seemed like.”
As Paddy sipped his pint of lager, he was approached by two police constables. “One was a really nice guy. I’d been talking to him on my way past security, we’d had a bit of craic, and I’d been giving him hell about England being kicked out of the European Cup by Poland the night before. He told me that I had to make a statement about where I’d been that day, and offered me a li to the local police station. “I got out of that car, and as I walked up two flights of steps of my own free will, on my own, I never imagined that they would be the last steps of freedom that I would take for the next sixteen years.” As Paddy sat smoking and reading his book, waiting to be released a er making a statement, he noticed an armed police officer staring at him, with what he describes as intense hatred. “I remember looking at him and his guns, and thinking, ‘Jesus, some poor bastard is in for a rough ride.’ I never for one minute thought it was me.” It was about half seven in the morning when Paddy was properly introduced to Sergeant Dunlop and the Westlands Serious Crime Squad for the first time. Hearing Dunlop’s threats, Paddy was apprehensive but still confident at that point that his statement had been accepted as the truth. “Then I was brought upstairs and was punched in the back of the neck. I remember someone shouting that my face wasn’t to be marked. That was about five to nine in the morning and they played football with me from then until 5pm. “My mother, God rest her, she used to say to me ‘Son, don’t be bitter, because bitterness is like a cancer that eats away at you inside.’ But I am bitter about those policemen. Even today, as I tell you this, I can still feel it happening to me all over again. “Eventually I was picked up off the floor and slammed into a chair. The guy in charge says to me, ‘We know you didn’t do the bombs. We don’t give a fuck who done the bombs. We’ve got you and that’s good enough for us. Our orders are to get confessions and convictions out of you, using any means possible. There’s only one thing to be decided. And that’s when you go on trial, whether you’ll get a natural life sentence or a forty-five year recommended.’ And he was fucking right.” The six men were beaten, interrogated and tortured over the course of three days to force them into signing false
■ Paddy Joe Hill confessions of their involvement in the Birmingham pub bombings. Their Irish roots and departure for the coast within hours of the explosions to attend the funeral of a known IRA figure had given the police all the grounds they needed to suspect them. “They started lashing me with the leather thong of a police truncheon across the chest and across the thighs. They rammed the truncheon into my privates, telling me that I’d make no more Irish bastards when they were through with me.
“They rammed the truncheon into my privates, telling me that I’d make no more Irish bastards when they were through with me” “One of them turned around and hit me down on top of the head with his handgun. Then he put the gun into my mouth and broke all my teeth. He said to me, ‘I’m
going to count to three. If you want to sign a statement, blink your eye. If you don’t, I’m going to blow your fucking head off. He cocked the gun, then pulled the trigger. He did that three times that evening.” The policemen subsequently set about keeping them awake all night to lower their resistance and weaken their resolve. “They brought Alsatian dogs in and they told us that if we tried to talk, they’d set them on us. One of them came up to the cell door, put a shotgun through a gap in the door and started screaming, calling us murdering Irish bastards, that our wives and daughters were going to become IRA whores. “They made us stand in the middle of the room with our arms and legs outspread. They did that to everyone, went around to all the cells one by one, threatening us with their guns and then they would start again. It went on all night.” The next morning, Paddy was separated from his friends and taken upstairs. “I was beaten all morning until one of the guys looked at his watch and said it was time to go for dinner and put me back in my cell. “They told me they’d be back, and sure enough they came in at three, smelling of booze, and took me upstairs and battered
me then until about seven, at which point they took a break, then continued beating me until around twelve o’clock. One of them said, ‘Take him back downstairs because I can’t hit him anymore, my hands are too fucking sore.’” The Birmingham Six were forced to sign statements written by the police over the three days of interrogation. In order to avoid facing disciplinary procedures for the serious injuries inflicted on the men, Paddy maintains that ‘a reception committee’ was organised for them by the police force in the prison that they were escorted to. “They said that when the ‘committee’ was through with us, we’d never be able to prove who it was that had tortured us. That’s exactly what happened; they brought us up to prison and started telling the screws about the explosions in Birmingham, about picking up the bodies and body parts. “We got a terrible beating that day from those prison guards, that bad that we couldn’t even walk, we were crawling around the exercise yard on our hands and knees. We now have statements from those prison officers admitting what they did to us.” Paddy was sentenced to life imprisonment in a maximum security prison for a crime which he did not commit. “People haven’t got a fucking clue what prison is really like, it’s not the Mickey Mouse affair that you see portrayed in the movies. I ended up in Parkhurst, where sixtyeight percent of the inmates have serious mental disorders. “Life is cheap in them places, I’ve seen people killed, seen people get stabbed. That’s the way you live twenty-four hours a day. As soon as you wake, it’s welcome to the killing fields. “You don’t see nothing, hear nothing. Those are the rules of prison. The prison officers hated the six of us especially; they’d piss in our tea and spit in our food. It’s no wonder the six of us are all so fucked up.” Since his appeal and subsequent release in 1991, Paddy has been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Today Paddy Joe Hill is the founder of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation and lives in Scotland. “I’m in a worse condition now then when I came out of prison seventeen fucking years ago. Nobody knows how to help us. How does a psychologist help someone like me when he doesn’t even know where to start?”