Half a Century after one of worst atrocities of the Troubles we have reminder of why people need Truth and Justice or, in its absence a Truth Recovery Process
Liam Collins, Belfast Telegraph, November 16th, 2024
JOURNALIST AND MP CHRIS MULLIN WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN FREEING THE BIRMINGHAM SIX, BUT WAS CRITICISED FOR REFUSING TO IDENTIFY THE PERPETRATORS. HE TALKED TO LIAM COLLINS 50 YEARS ON FROM THE IRA ATROCITY
On a cold November day in 1974, as the people of Birmingham went about their business unaware of the horror that was about to fall on their city, 'Big Mick' Murray was putting the finishing touches to the bombs that exploded in two of its bars, murdering 21 people and injuring 220 more.
Fifty years after those Provisional IRA attacks blighted the hopes and dreams of so many, relatives of the dead and injured still do not know officially who the bombers were, or why Birmingham was targeted.
“I think the only question left is the identity of two members of the unit that carried out the bombing,” investigative journalist and writer Chris Mullin tells me this week. He knows the identity of one of them.
Mullin has lived with the aftermath of the bombings for more than 40 years and was described by one newspaper “as worse than the bombers” for his crusade to unearth the truth behind what was, at the time, the worst modern peacetime atrocity on English soil.
Like the Dublin and Monaghan bombings six months before, the Birmingham bombings never faded from public memory, much as the IRA perpetrators, their Sinn Fein political wing and the bungling British judicial establishment would have wished.
It all began 50 years ago next Thursday. At 8.11pm on the night of November 21, 1974, a telephonist at the Birmingham Post and Mail took a call from a man who said cryptically: “The code word is Double X… there is a bomb planted in the Rotunda and there is a bomb in New Street… at the tax office.”
Then the line went dead.
Seven minutes later, as police scrambled to get to the two venues, the first bomb went off at the Mulberry Bush pub, which occupied the bottom floors of the carbuncle-like Rotunda tower block in the centre of Birmingham. “We were about 300 yards away, just cresting the hill, when there was the loudest thunderclap and rumbling and the ground shook,” said PC Rodney Hazelwood, who was racing towards the scene.
“Debris was coming down all over the road. It was like a volcano had exploded, people running and screaming… The Mulberry Bush had sort of exploded out on to the pavement — rubble, half a staircase, glass, carpets, bar-tops and furniture blown to bits and injured people staggering out.”
Later reports said that victims had been impaled by sections of wooden furniture; others had clothes burned into their bodies. A paramedic described it as a “slaughterhouse” and a fireman said that it was so horrific he begged police to allow cameras to film the dead and dying “so that the IRA would see the consequences of their actions”.
As the injured staggered from the wreckage at 8.27pm, a second explosion ripped through the nearby Tavern in the Town, an underground bar below the city's tax office.
The blast was so powerful that victims were blown through a brick wall. Police officer Brian Yates testified that he saw the dead and dying stacked on top of each other. One survivor recalled the deafening blast of the bomb being followed by a deadly silence and the smell of burnt flesh.
The father of two of the victims, Irishman John Reilly, was called to identify the body of his son Eugene (23). Instead, he was shown the body of his older son Desmond, who was not meant to be in the city that night. The brothers had been having a drink and died together in the explosion.
The stench of burnt flesh permeated the corridors of the city's emergency rooms as nurses and doctors tried to deal with the catastrophic fallout.
An inquest later ruled that all 21 deaths — 10 in the Mulberry Bush and 11 in the Tavern — were IRA murders.
A third bomb, which had been planted beside a branch of Lloyds Bank nearby, was destroyed in a controlled explosion shortly after 9pm.
In Birmingham, there was an immediate backlash against the Irish community. In Belfast, seven people were murdered in the days that followed.
More than 50 IRA bombs had exploded at various locations around the West Midlands in the months leading up to this Thursday night onslaught. The IRA denied responsibility but tried to justify what happened, claiming the 'operation' was not 'sanctioned' by its leadership.
“The trail that led to the disaster in Birmingham began seven days earlier outside the central telephone exchange in Greyfriars Lane, Coventry,” wrote Chris Mullin in his seminal book Error of Judgement, which has been reissued and updated to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the bombings.
“It was there, on the evening of the 14th of November 1974, that a young Irishman named James McDade blew himself to smithereens while planting a bomb.”
“James McDade, Lieutenant, Birmingham Battalion, Killed in Action,” read death notices in republican publications. In Irish pubs around the city, appeals were made for people to turn out as “the remains of our comrade” were escorted from Coventry to Birmingham, where he lived, and on to Belfast, draped in the tricolour that once decked the coffin of hunger striker Michael Gaughan.
As friends of McDade in Birmingham scrabbled together the money to make the journey to his funeral, his colleagues in the IRA were preparing to send 21 innocent people in his wake.
That evening, November 21, five Belfast men, Paddy Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and Johnny Walker, had taken the 5.55pm train from Birmingham to Heysham on their way to Belfast for the funeral.
Stopped by police before boarding the ferry, forensic tests appeared to show Power and Hill had handled explosives. A sixth man, Hugh Callaghan, from Derry, was arrested in Birmingham the following day.
They were initially held in the town of Morecambe, but after West Midlands Police, based in Birmingham, took charge they were beaten up by police and prison officers and tortured into signing forged confessions and implicating each other. They went on trial in the summer of 1975, were found guilty by a jury and symbolically given 21 life sentences each for murder.
'Big Mick' Murray, a self-confessed IRA man who was tried with them on conspiracy charges, gave no evidence, did not allow his barrister to cross-examine witnesses and remained silent for the 45 days of the trial. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.
In 1980, when the 'Six' attempted to bring a civil claim against police for mistreatment in custody, Lord Denning famously dismissed their case, saying to accept that the police had lied and beaten false confessions from them was “an appalling vista”.
In Error of Judgement, Mullin credits his friend, Peter Chippindale of the Guardian, for drawing his attention to what he believed was a miscarriage of justice, a conclusion backed up by David Brazil, who covered the trial for the Irish Press.
In 1985, when he was employed by Granada Television, he persuaded them to make three groundbreaking documentaries on the case and cracks in the case against the six men began to appear.
Elected Labour MP for Sunderland in 1987, Mullin had a parliamentary platform to take it further, even though a second appeal that same year was rejected. “The longer this hearing has gone on,” said the judge, “the more convinced this court has become that the verdict of the jury was correct.”
Finally, after 16 years in jail, at a third trial, the previous verdicts were quashed and on March 14, 1991, the Birmingham Six walked free.
All through those years as they languished in jail, all the IRA did was deny that they were members of its organisation. The so-called 'army council' never admitted responsibility, nor revealed any details of the Birmingham-based terrorist cell that carried out the bombing.
“One of the problems with putting away the wrong people, of course, is that the real culprits often carry on exactly as before,” wrote Mullin later. “I interviewed many of those who were active in the IRA's West Midlands campaign. One of the four men responsible for the Birmingham bombings went on, I discovered, to become deputy head of the IRA's England department in which capacity he would have played a part in much of the subsequent terrorism on the British mainland.”
Mick Murray, who had previous terrorist convictions, was arrested four days after the bombing and stood trial alongside the Birmingham Six. Two of them later claimed that he told them when they were in prison that he was involved in the bombings.
“I am very sorry to see you in here, nothing went right that night,” he told them. He threatened them that if they divulged this admission, their families would feel the wrath of the IRA.
Mullin interviewed Mick Murray in Dublin some years before he died of cancer in 1999. “He did say to me, 'I don't like you very much, you are only in this for yourself',” Mullin says.
Murray and another IRA man made the bombs and delivered them in a holdall or briefcase to two other IRA men, who planted them outside the selected targets. One of these men has been identified as James Francis Gavin, from whose house the four terrorists set out that night. Gavin admitted being an IRA activist, but went to his grave in 2002 refusing to admit his part in the bombings.
Murray also had the responsibility for phoning a 30-minute warning, which could have saved so many lives but was botched because, he claimed, the public phone he had identified for this purpose had been vandalised.
Another IRA man, Michael Christopher Hayes, who still lives in Dublin, has accepted, in interviews, “collective responsibility” for the atrocity, but not admitted he was one of the bombers.
At a second inquest into the Birmingham pub bombings in 2019, families of the victims were stunned by evidence from 'Witness O' — described as an IRA man who was on 'active service' in England but in jail that November.
In evidence, he said that he understood the “pain and suffering” of the victims and their families and proceeded to name three people as complicit in the bombings: Gavin, Hayes and Seamus McLoughlin, who died in Dublin in 2014, and was OC (officer commanding) the Birmingham unit of the IRA at the time.
Although the case of the Birmingham bombings is still open, relatives of the dead and injured remain angry that the perpetrators were never brought to justice.
Error of Judgement: The Birmingham Bombings and the Scandal the Shook Britain, by Chris Mullin, is published by Monoray
Comments
I remember that night so well.
I left the tax office and walked to Moor Street Station at 5:30.
I met up with my boyfriend and went to the Dolphin Pub in Acocks Green.
We were all talking about Christmas and what Midnight Mass we were going to....deciding on the shortest one !
Later in the evening one of the regulars came in and said there had been some trouble in Town.
Others followed, reporting Police, Ambulance and Fire services by the Rotunda.
I said that I wanted to go home as my Mom and Dad would be worried ..
( I usually stayed in town for a drink in The Tavern after work.)
By the time I got home my poor parents were up the walls with worry.
My Dad had his coat on to go looking for me, but Town was a no go area, especially if you had an Irish accent. We all cried until we were exhausted.
I went into work the following day....the reality really hit me. My Mom wouldn't speak on the train for fear that someone would hear her accent.
We walked our separate ways in silence. They had queues set up for staff to sign in , I whispered my name and was asked to repeat it. I felt hot and bothered and very sick.......I had not felt this feeling before , it was shame.
I was told to take anything personal from my desk and then we were all to go home.
We all walked into the office in complete silence.
The windows were blown in by the blast, glass and papers everywhere, the curtains were shredded. I couldn't see my desk with the clouds of dust and smells that I could not identify..
One colleague put her arm around me.....we weren't friends but her parents were Irish too.
I don't remember getting home, but I do remember when my Dad walked in. His workmates spat on the floor in front of him , he endured many derogatory comments about the Irish. My Mom was a Floor Manager at H Samuel, customers refused to be served by her when they heard her accent. She wanted to leave because of it . Both my parents did have support, not from the Irish community but the many lovely English friends that they had made.
I was privileged to have the best of both worlds and very proud too.
This is the first time I have put these memories down .....it's only taken 50 years!
But we do carry a lot on our back.....maybe it's a bit lighter now
Keep the faith Padraig
Rosemary O'Riordan (nee O'Reilly)
Rosemary O'Riordan was 18 in 1974 and worked as a Tax Officer with the Inland Revenue on New Street in the centre of Birmingham not far from the pubs where the bombs were detonated.
