'My time in prison with man wrongly convicted of bombing Birmingham... and one of the men who really did it'

Shane Paul O’Doherty, Belfast Telegraph, January 1st, 2025

WRITING AFTER THE DEATH OF PADDY HILL, FORMER IRA MAN SHANE PAUL O'DOHERTY REFLECTS ON ADVISING THE MAN 'NEXT DOOR'

In his book, Forever Lost, Forever Gone, Paddy Hill kindly recorded our interaction in 1982 in Gartree Prison, Leicestershire, when in a fit of depression at his wrongful conviction and imprisonment he threatened to begin a hunger strike to the death. He was not joking.

He had written to his five co-defendants asking them to join him in the hunger strike, but they had refused — a response that had depressed him further and driven him to an extreme.

He wrote that I talked him out of that notion and encouraged him to begin a campaign of letter writing to members of parliament, journalists and churchmen. I gave him a sample letter and edited his later letters. I put him in touch with solicitor Gareth Peirce.

He noted that “by the time I met [Shane], he had left the IRA and renounced its violence with the words: 'I was a hypocrite. In injuring human beings I did not cure injustices, I created new ones'”.

My advice helped Paddy at a crucial point in his prison existence.

One of his prison letters convinced a local Conservative MP, Sir John Farr, to visit him and to begin to investigate his case and of course Gareth Peirce became a tireless advocate.

Sir John took Paddy's forensic evidence to experts who rubbished it and Paddy suddenly had a very powerful Conservative parliamentary supporter.

Paddy left out of his book that our interaction occurred entirely in the solitary confinement block of Gartree Prison.

I was in solitary as part of a long protest for a transfer to a prison in Northern Ireland which was granted in 1985 after I had spent 10 years in English prisons.

To speak to Paddy Hill in an adjacent solitary cell, I had to stand on the metal bedframe to reach the small window opening high up and shout my advice to him which all of the other solitary prisoners — and prison officers — could also hear.

The sample campaigning letter I wrote for him had to be smuggled under my cell door and then under his cell door — and the 'trusty' prisoner who worked in and cleaned the solitary block helped to make this communication possible while ostensibly passing a newspaper from cell to cell — something which the prison staff never prevented.

So, for all of Paddy's kind words in his book, I never actually met him face to face.

He was a voice from a cell window to which I responded. Paddy's quote about my description of myself as a hypocrite came from a letter I had sent to Martin McGuinness in 1977 calling on the IRA to cease its armed struggle and enter democratic politics.

McGuinness refused to print my letter in Republican News so I asked Bishop Edward Daly of Derry to have it published in the press.

The letter was published in February 1978 and got national attention. After this, the majority of IRA prisoners in the English prisons refused to speak to me. This didn't bother me.

Following my conviction in 1976, I had refused to wear 'criminal uniform' in Wormwood Scrubs and began a blanket protest almost naked in solitary confinement for 15 months.

During that protest, a Jesuit priest — a former British Army officer — argued with me and on one occasion I asked him, “Where is the proof your god exists?” He replied, “Why — the Four Gospels of course!”, after which I demanded a copy of the Bible to get some material for a counter-argument.

I had never read any part of the Bible, a common trait of Catholic lay persons then.

After I'd read Matthew's Gospel one evening in my cell, I was — how can I say it reasonably? — overcome by a sense of sin, of my own sins and of the IRA's sins.

I felt very powerfully that I was on the wrong side against God.

I was determined to make a break with violence and the IRA and to make a new start for myself, whatever the consequences. I later fought, and won, a battle with the Home Office to write letters of apology to my victims.

All of this was ridiculed by the IRA, by IRA prisoners, by prison warders and governors, by the Home Office and only Bishop Edward Daly of Derry stood by me.

When I donned criminal uniform and joined the other IRA prisoners on D Wing of Wormwood Scrubs in late 1977, one of them — Mick Murray — told some of the IRA prisoners that I should be killed in my cell to prevent me becoming a 'supergrass'. Mick Murray was one of the actual Birmingham pub bombers who was serving only 12 years — and whom the Birmingham trial judge complimented for his silence during the trial as having a “soldierly bearing”.

And so, on my own lonely journey through 14 years of imprisonment — for which I was and remain eternally grateful since it enabled me to break free of the IRA — I met not only one of the real Birmingham pub bombers who wanted to kill me, but also was able to remotely 'meet' and affect one of the wrongly convicted Birmingham pub bombers, Paddy Hill, in time to divert him from his suicidal intent and to put him on a different path.

Was this circuitous journey through England's solitary confinement cell blocks all a matter of mere chance or was there some other kind of hand in it?

Paddy Hill thought there was, and so do I.