Chris Mullin and the Birmingham Six 50 years on: ‘My goal was simply to rescue the innocent’

The IRA placed bombs in two Birmingham pubs, the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town, on November 21st, 1974. The bombs exploded, killing 21 people and inflicting life-changing injuries on many others.

The bombs were aimed not at the pubs but at the buildings they occupied. The Tavern was underneath the New Street offices of the Inland Revenue and the Mulberry Bush was in the base of the Rotunda, a local landmark. There was a warning, but it came too late and the bombs detonated before the pubs could be evacuated.

Several hours after the explosions, five men, all Birmingham residents, were arrested in Morecambe as they got off a train that connected with the ferry to Belfast. A sixth man was arrested at his home in Birmingham the following day. After three days and nights in the custody of the West Midlands Police, four of the six had signed confessions, admitting to having planted the bombs, and two were said to have tested positive for having recently handled explosives.

They were tried at Lancaster in the summer of 1975, found guilty and sentenced to 21 life sentences apiece. Had the death penalty still been in force they would have hanged. The case would turn out to be one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. Even now, 50 years after the event, the ripples spread outward.

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Who were the Birmingham Six?

A group of innocent Irish men wrongly convicted of two 1974 IRA pub bombings in Britain. Their case was one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice during the Troubles. They were mistreated in custody and forced to give false confessions by West Midlands police. They were eventually released after more than 16 years in prison.

• Patrick Joseph Hill.
• Gerard Hunter.
• William Power.
• John Walker.
• Richard McIlkenny, who died in 2006.
• Hugh Callaghan, who died in 2023.

Proving innocence – and finding the actual bombers

My friend, the late Peter Chippindale, who reported the trial for the Guardian, was the first to draw my attention to the case. He remarked at the time that he thought the six men were innocent. He had reached this conclusion solely on the basis of his attendance in court and from talking to relatives of some of the convicted men. David Brazil, a journalist with the Irish Press, reached the same conclusion. Among the many journalists who covered the trial, Chippindale and Brazil were alone in realising that there was more to this story than met the eye.

Although from that moment onwards I kept an eye on the case as it wound its way through the courts, I was in no position to do much about it. In the early 1980s the publisher Carmen Calill commissioned me to write a book on the subject. Even then, however, I lacked the resources to conduct a proper investigation. It was not until 1985 when I persuaded Ray Fitzwalter, editor of the Granada Television documentary programme World in Action, to employ me to research the case that we were able to make progress.

My Granada colleagues and I made three prime time documentaries. The first destroyed the forensic evidence. The second blew a hole in the confession evidence and the third consisted of an interview with one of the actual bombers.

I had realised from the outset that merely discrediting the case against the convicted men would not prove their innocence, only that the case against them was weak. To prove innocence I would have to track down the actual bombers and persuade them to own up in sufficient detail as to make it impossible for those in authority to go on arguing that the real bombers were in custody. This is what I set out to do.

By a process of painstaking detective work I tracked down the men I believe to be the four bombers. They each owned up to involvement in the IRA’s West Midlands bombing campaign, but only two admitted their role in the pub bombings.

In previous editions of my book they are identified only by letters of the alphabet. I am now able to name three of the four. Two are dead and one, who admits only to having been “collectively responsible” for the atrocity, is living in Dublin. A fourth person, whom I describe in my book as the “young planter” of the bomb, and whose identity I am unable to disclose, lives in Ireland.

My book, Error of Judgement, was first published in July 1986 and received a mixed reception. “A book that could put him in prison ... Mr Mullin ... is either a liar or a hypocrite,” opined a reviewer in the Sunday Express. No one, however, alleged that my claim to have traced the bombers was false. With honourable exceptions, Birmingham as a whole was in denial. The news editor of the Birmingham Post claimed never to have even heard a suggestion that the wrong people had been convicted. One bookshop displayed just two copies on a shelf labelled “Irish interest”.

In June 1987 I was elected to parliament, which gave me a new platform from which to pursue the case. I could now confront directly those in charge of the criminal justice system and I took every opportunity to do so. Eventually, the Devon and Cornwall Police were asked to conduct an independent inquiry into the evidence unearthed by Granada Television, and in due course home secretary Douglas Hurd referred the case back to the Court of Appeal. Lord Lane, the lord chief justice, dismissed the appeal with contempt. “The longer this hearing has gone on,” he said, “the more convinced this court has become that the verdict of the jury was correct”. Words he would live to regret.

Gradually, more stones began to fall from the arch. In August 1989, West Midlands chief constable Geoffrey Dear was forced to disband the notorious regional crime squad following a growing list of scandals, many involving intimidation and false confessions. Several prominent members of the squad were also involved in the pub bombings investigation15 years earlier. The implications were obvious.

Three months later the four people convicted of the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings were sensationally freed after the confessions that formed the basis of their convictions were found to have been fabricated. Despite official foot-dragging, it soon became clear that the Birmingham case, also heavily dependent on confessions, would once again have to be reopened.

[ Birmingham Six were furious with Haughey for not seeking their release ]

[ British government feared ‘tabloid scandal’ if it released Birmingham Six ]

[ In the Name of Gerry Conlon: Horrifying revelations about Britain’s treatment of the Guildford Four ]

The Devon and Cornwall Police were again asked to conduct an inquiry. They went back to the original police notebooks and quickly demonstrated that the confessions were forgeries – or ”unreliable” to use the legal jargon. Another reference to the Court of Appeal was inevitable and this time there was no doubt about the outcome. On Thursday, March 14th, 1991, amid much official breast-beating, the convictions were finally quashed and after 17 years in prison the men walked free.

The consequences were far-reaching. Within hours the home secretary announced a royal commission to examine the criminal justice system. It led eventually to the setting up of the Criminal Cases Review Commission which, at the time of writing, has resulted in the quashing of a further 500 convictions. It has also led to a sea change in the attitude of judges and juries towards police evidence.

Despite the outcome of the Birmingham case, however, the upper reaches of the legal profession remained in denial for many years. For years afterwards senior lawyers could be heard whispering that those whose convictions had been so spectacularly quashed were all really guilty. I lost count of the number of people who said to me, “I had dinner with Judge so and so last night and you should hear what he is saying about the Birmingham Six.” Hopefully, a new generation of judges and lawyers will prove less gullible than their predecessors.

The lingering question, and a request

The question remains: who was responsible for the bombings? Over the years there have been several new inquiries by the West Midlands police. These were, of course, hampered by their reluctance to disturb the official version of events. In 2018, however, a vociferous campaign by relatives of some of those who died in the bombings persuaded the authorities to reopen the long postponed inquest into the bombings. This resulted in yet another West Midlands police investigation, though this one appeared to be a great deal more rigorous than earlier ones.

As with previous inquiries, I co-operated to the best of my ability, but made clear from the outset that I was unwilling to disclose confidential sources. This prompted the chief constable to apply for an order under the Terrorism Act that would have obliged me to disclose my notes of an interview with one of the surviving bombers. I declined on the grounds that the interview has been obtained only as a result of absolute assurances of confidentiality.

It is a cardinal principle of journalism in a democracy, enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, that journalists should not be forced to reveal their sources. The National Union of Journalists, recognising the significance of the issue, paid my legal costs. The application was heard at the Old Bailey and, in March 2022. I was vindicated. The judge refused to grant the order.

Although the outcome was celebrated by fellow journalists and those concerned with the rights of a free press in a democracy, I readily understand that it will not seem so reasonable to those who lost loved ones in the bombings or to the public in general. I would only ask that they bear in mind that but for my investigation the names of three of the four bombers might never have been known, the six innocent men convicted of the bombings might have remained in prison to this day, and subsequent reforms to the criminal justice system would not have occurred.

I was never under the illusion that I could bring the perpetrators to justice. My goal was simply to rescue the innocent.

Error of Judgement – The Birmingham Bombings and the Scandal that Shook Britain is published by Monoray (€15)

Who are the alleged perpetrators involved in the Birmingham bombings?

A man who previously apologised on behalf of the Provisional IRA for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, in which 21 people were killed, has denied claims he was one of the bombers on the night, writes Conor Lally, Security and Crime Editor .

Michael Christopher Hayes told The Irish Times he defused a third bomb on the streets of Birmingham on the night of the attacks, when he realised the first two pub bombings had gone wrong. He declined to outline any further detail about his role.

“I didn’t do it, I wasn’t part of the team,” he said when it was put to him he was now being described as one of the bombers in a new edition of a book about the bombings and subsequent miscarriage of justice.

However, he said he was a “commander” of the IRA’s operations in Britain at the time, adding he was an “explosives expert” who had trained in Libya.

Speaking at his Dublin home, he claimed had tried to “call off” the Birmingham bombings when he realised the bomb warnings had been delayed. As a result, he said he had defused a third bomb “on the same night” in the city.

Mr Hayes insisted the bombings were never intended to kill people and were instead aimed at causing only commercial damage. However, he said when members of the IRA had tried to phone in warnings on the night, so that people would be evacuated from the pubs, they found phone boxes in Birmingham were either out of order or occupied.

This had slowed down the process of calling in the bomb warnings, resulting in the pubs still being crowded when the explosions occurred. The bombs were planted in the Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town pubs on the night of November 21st, killing 21 and injuring 220 more.

Mr Hayes claimed when he learned people were still in the pubs when the bombs had exploded he felt “terrible, terrible”. He claims he then immediately defused the third, and largest, bomb intended to be detonated that night.

He was also regretful that Irish people in Britain were then “ostracised because of the sound of their voice” in the wake of the atrocity. He added that when innocent people – who became known as the Birmingham Six – were wrongfully convicted of the bombings, he felt “terrible”.

“They didn’t blame us at all, no ...,” he added of the Birmingham Six, saying they blamed the British for the miscarriage of justice that led to them being jailed for 17 years.

The convictions of the six men – Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker – were quashed in March 1991, and they were freed.

Chris Mullin, the journalist and former MP, has now named Mr Hayes, as one of the bombers, along with James Francis Gavin and Michael Murray, in a new edition of his book on the bombings and wrongful conviction of the Birmingham Six. In Error of Judgement – The Birmingham Bombings and the Scandal that Shook Britain, he also names Seamus McLoughlin as “head of the West Midlands IRA at the time of the bombings”.

While Mr McLoughlin, Mr Murray and Mr Gavin died in 2014, 1999 and 2002 respectively, Mr Hayes (76) still lives in Dublin. Mr Mullin, who worked on the Granada TV documentary broadcast in 1990 that helped expose the miscarriage of justice said he was also aware of another bomber. He writes that this man was the youngest of the group but he has not named him.

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