interview with the Justice Gap<\/a>).<\/p>\n\u2018Our criminal justice system is probably one of the best in the world. It\u2019s not the system that\u2019s wrong. It is the bastards who sit on the bench who are indoctrinated into preserving the status quo.\u2019
Paddy Hill<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n
Patrick Maguire was just 13 years old when he was arrested at his home in west London as the youngest of the so called\u00a0 Maguire Seven \u2013 an entire family found guilty of running an IRA bomb factory from their Kilburn kitchen. They were wrongly convicted in 1975 and had their convictions quashed in 1991. \u2018I don\u2019t dwell on it too much,\u2019 Maguire told the audience. \u2018But I can\u2019t hide from the fact that I was a child when this happened. It goes without saying it had a big impact.\u2019 He is now an artist \u2013 his work appeared in in PROOF issue 4. \u2018My life turned black and white \u2013 colourless overnight \u2013 after we got arrested,\u2019 he told the audience.<\/p>\n
He gave his support to the MOJO film project. \u2018I hope one day, when this film is done, that people will see it, they\u2019ll be shocked and stunned, and they will cry \u2013 and they will laugh somewhere in there as well. And for my own self, my children, my grandchildren, for them, things like this need to be done. So when I\u2019m not around one day to let them know that wrong was done but we put it right.\u2019<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/paddy-hill-FO.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Gareth Peirce recalled a young Paddy Hill as \u2018a 15-year old happy tearaway\u2019\u00a0 \u2013 exceptionally bright, a voracious reader and good at mathematics. But, the prospects for a young catholic boy in Belfast in the late 1950s were limited. As Peirce recalled Hill joking: \u2018If you were a Catholic wanting to go to Queen\u2019s University in Belfast, the only way you get in is if you donated your body to science.\u2019 However that young Paddy was \u2018pitchforked\u2019 from Belfast to Birmingham when his father was sacked from his job for being a Catholic.<\/p>\n
Then came the Birmingham pub bombings on November 21, 1974 \u2013 the worst mainland attack since the Second World War, claiming the lives of 21 people and injuring hundreds. In the immediate aftermath, Hill and the others were \u2018pulled off a train\u2019 traveling from Birmingham to catch the Heysham ferry to Belfast on their way to a funeral of a friend.<\/p>\n
As Peirce related: \u2018His extreme ill-fortune was that police who were called to investigate were the infamous, corrupt, brutal West Midlands Serious Crime Squad and the forensic scientist who was on call that night, Dr Skuse, was incompetent, mendacious and hopeless.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018It was the end. There was nothing left. But he was determined to find a way.\u2019<\/strong>
The six men were \u2018smashed to smithereens in a Birmingham police station\u2019. \u2018When they emerged with the marks to show it, the solicitors at court failed to log the injuries, but still managed to get legal aid forms signed,\u2019 recalled Peirce. The men were taken to Winston Green Prison \u2018where the reception for the men was to leave blood, teeth \u2013 Paddy\u2019s teeth \u2013 all over the floor of the prison\u2019.\u00a0 So, as the lawyer put it, the evidence of the beating by the police was \u2018satisfactorily eradicated\u2019.<\/p>\nIt was the courts (in the person of Lord Denning) that completed the cover-up of the police\u2019s violence when they closed off the men\u2019s opportunity attempts to sue West Midlands Police with a speech that has since become infamous. In 1980, the then Master of the Rolls upheld an appeal by the West Midlands Police against a civil action brought by the Birmingham Six for injuries they received in custody. Contemplating the seemingly unthinkable prospect of the police framing innocent man, Denning said that this was such \u2018an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: \u201cit cannot be right that these actions should go any further. If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence\u2026\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n
But even this knock-back didn\u2019t deter Hill. In fact, Gareth Peirce reported that the hopelessness of the situation prompted the prisoner into action writing \u2019up to a thousand letters\u2019. \u2018Mine arrived soon after, in the early 1980s,\u2019 she recalled. \u2018He was in prison, tortured mentally by the fact of the conviction. He was in permanent protest.\u2019 The lawyer recollected being stuck in the visitor\u2019s queue at HMP Gartree behind a man who had arrived to fix the sewing machines. He was asked how long he was likely to be, he replied \u2018quite a long time\u2019. Hill had smashed up every sewing machine in the workshop.<\/p>\n
Peirce recalled his behaviour as \u2018self destructive\u2019 but not \u2018negative\u2019. \u2018Paddy was not passive when I met him. He said: \u201cListen, sweetheart, you may be a good lawyer. I don\u2019t know, and I don\u2019t care. What I hope is you understand how it works, and you\u2019ll help me find a way through this.\u201d He was determined. It was the end. There was nothing left, but he was determined that there was a way. For the next almost a decade, we were comrades in arms \u2013 to find a way. That was the battle\u2026 to find a way. And for the 35 years that followed, he was also my comrade and my friend.\u2019<\/p>\n
The lawyer described how the pair \u2018stumbled along sometimes as if we had only a white stick to guide us\u2019 \u2013 attracting the interest of Chris Mullin, the former MP who was then the editor of The Tribune who went onto champion the Birmingham Six. Mullin had a friend at ITV\u2019s leading investigative program, World in Action which went on to make the documentary Who bombed Birmingham? One of Paddy Hill\u2019s thousand letters\u00a0 landed at the office of his local Gartree MP, Sir John Farr, a Conservative MP for Harborough. Peirce recalled him as \u2018a serious, good man\u2026 who read all the papers and told Paddy he believed he was innocent\u2019. Then a former police officer, Tom Clark came forward who had been on duty in the police station \u2018when the men were being battered to death\u2019.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/the-case-of-the-birmingham-six.png\")
<\/p>\n
According to Peirce, Clarke wasn\u2019t the best witness in the world \u2013 he had been dismissed for petty theft \u2013\u00a0 but the cumulative impact of a slowly building campaign meant \u2018there was no option but for the Home Office to refer the case to the Court of Appeal\u2019. An outside force, Devon and Cornwall police, was brought in to investigate and seize materials from the West Midlands Police. It still wasn\u2019t enough. The Court of Appeal \u2018turned its face against all of the evidence\u2019, including more former police officers who had observed the \u2018mock executions, threats, beatings in the police station in the five days they were there\u2019.<\/p>\n
By this time, the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad was \u2018imploding\u2019. \u2018There had been too many beatings, too many false confessions, too much evidence that things were like the Wild West, totally uncontrolled,\u2019 Peirce recalled. The solicitor had sent letters to everyone her firm represented in prisons around the country asking if any had been convicted on the basis of West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad evidence. She then sought their prosecution papers which were full of \u2018verbals\u2019, where the police alleged that a suspect said something which was denied. It wasn\u2019t subtle, Peirce recalled. \u2018There would be West Midlands dialect in the confession, whether the person was from Scotland, Wales, Devon or Cornwall.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
On October 19, 1998 the Guildford Four were released sending shockwaves, through the system. Finally, the Irish government (\u2018astonishingly late\u2019) expressed its concern about the Birmingham Six. \u2018Every person in Ireland knew by now about the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, even if those in England didn\u2019t, and then Irish Americans, a constituency of 40 million Americans of Irish descent, took an interest,\u2019\u00a0 Peirce recollected. There was \u2018a pincer movement of political pressure\u2019. The \u2018clincher\u2019 was Devon and Cornwall Police seizing papers amidst \u2018a mad dash\u2019 at WMP records office who were busy destroying notebooks \u2013 but too late. \u2018Those notebooks didn\u2019t disappear,\u2019 the lawyer said. \u2018They were retained and they showed, provably, that all of the interviews had been made up. Indentations on paper underneath in a notebook showed where something had been changed. A page had been ripped out, but the indentation was still there and proved what the six men had said from start to finish.\u2019<\/p>\n
Beyond treatment<\/strong>
On March 14, 1991 the six men had their convictions overturned and they left the old Bailey as free men. \u2018In the years after, what Paddy gave was as astonishing as what he gave to the case he\u2019d been convicted of. It was Paddy who did it. It was Paddy who got the six men out, his initiatives. But for them we wouldn\u2019t be here talking about this. Paddy and the others would have died in prison or still be alive and suffering and their families.\u2019<\/p>\n\u2018What he did when he came out was just as astonishing,\u2019 said Peirce. \u2018His exceptional transposition of understanding, comprehension of what was necessary, and direct action was shown all over again when he came out.\u2019 It came at a cost. Hill suffered from post traumatic stress disorder which means \u2018in its most vivid form, the person suffering from it, the trauma is reactivated. They suffer it again and again.\u2019\u00a0 Doctors who examined the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and other miscarriages of justice found that the damage suffered by victims of wrongful wrongful conviction was \u2018more extreme than the victims of extreme physical trauma, like a violent accident\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u2018When Paddy came out, he observed this in himself. It couldn\u2019t be treated. It was beyond treatment in Paddy. It was in too extreme a form, and ironically, some of his self-protective mechanisms that were there in prison weren\u2019t there anymore.\u2019<\/p>\n
She finished her lecture by observing that he did the most extraordinary thing when he set up MOJO. \u2018So in some ways, this is an apology, because it\u2019s not possible to say what should be said about Paddy,\u2019 she said. \u2018But he is one of the most extraordinary historic figures there has been in the history of this country, and somehow it doesn\u2019t quite get seen that way. No, it\u2019s other things. It could be a television program that did it, or someone thinks it\u2019s the lawyers who contributed. I can tell you it was Paddy.\u2019<\/p>\n
Support the Justice Gap, buy Proof<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"REMBERING PADDY HILL: Gareth Peirce has paid a moving tribute to her \u2018friend and comrade\u2019 Paddy Hill at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":961670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7820],"tags":[855,748,393,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-961669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-birmingham","8":"tag-birmingham","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116578950408387119","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=961669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/961670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=961669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=961669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=961669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_5474-2-e1778827532596.jpeg\")
Gareth Peirce recalled how, years after his conviction was overturned, a psychologist and a psychiatrist (Dr Jim MacKeith and Dr Gisli Gudjonsson) conducted a survey of wrongly convicted prisoners in cases where there had been false confessions. Paddy Hill withstood the torture inflicted on him and other five \u2013 Hugh Callaghan, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power, and John Walker. This variously included brutal beatings, mock executions, being set upon by dogs and threatened with being thrown out of windows.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_5234-scaled-e1778770335110.jpeg\")
Gareth Peirce was also joined by Matt Foot, co-director at APPEAL and Patrick Maguire of the Maguire Seven. Foot spoke about the crisis at the organisation that was set up on the recommendation of a royal commission established on the day that the Birmingham Six left the Old Bailey as free men. He quoted Hill\u2019s own damning assessments of the Criminal Cases Review Commission: \u2018It was very good for the first 12 to 18 months,\u2019 Hill said. \u2018But then the gates came down, and then they locked the gates.\u2019<\/p>\n