SISTER SARAH CLARKE: Sister Sarah Clarke, who died on February 4th aged 82, was the courageous and unsung heroine of the long and difficult campaign to clear the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven - the notorious miscarriages of justice cases that disgraced the British system of criminal justice and wrecked the lives of so many innocent people.
Her involvement began in 1970 when, living in London, she attended her first political meeting and it changed her life. She sought and was granted permission from her order, La Sainte Union, to join the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, then agitating against discrimination by the Unionist government.
She was born on November 17th, 1919, in Eyrecourt, Co Galway, the eldest of two children of Brigid and Michael Clarke,who ran a pub, shop and farm. Her father also had a child, Kathleen, from a previous marriage. She was educated at the Sisters of Mercy in Eyrecourt and St Raphael's in Loughrea. She entered La Sainte Union in Killashee, Co Kildare, when she was 20 and trained as a teacher at Carysfort Training College in Dublin.
Until her involvement in the civil rights movement, her existence had revolved around her religion and her teaching, from 1943 to 1957 in Athlone, and then at the La Sainte Union convent schools in Southampton, Herne Bay, Grays and Abbey Wood until 1974. But her commitment to civil rights opened up a different world.
She was, at first, as she acknowledged in her 1995 autobiography No Faith In The System, naive, believing it would be enough to tell people about injustice for things to be put right.
When her autobiography was published Monsignor Denis Faul described her as the "greatest feminist" he had ever met.
"She came, saw and conquered the power - often devilish - of the secular world of a great pagan city in favour of the poor, not only Irish nationalists, but loyalists and ODCs, ordinary decent criminals."
The book records the stories of prisoners' families - mainly Irish - and the abuse they suffered at the hands of the British authorities: accounts by wives and mothers of being arrested, interrogated, even strip-searched when they came to to visit their imprisoned relatives. She recorded the many breaches of human rights caused by the Prevention of Terrorism Act against which she had campaigned.
She wrote to Catholic MPs like the Conservative John Biggs-Davison about the Northern Ireland situation, but received little encouragement - though she and Biggs-Davison did become friends. Though she never gave up trying to persuade Establishment figures, as the title of her autobiography made clear, she never had high expectations, and her identification with those she saw as wronged and oppressed intensified. She started to visit the growing number of Irish prisoners in English jails, and became, as Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six put it, "the Joan of Arc of the prisons".
She did not discriminate between guilty and innocent. Asked in a television documentary about her life and work how she could justify visiting men who had planted bombs and killed civilians, she quoted Christ: "I was sick and in prison and you visited me," and she maintained it was possible to "hate the sin, but love the sinner".
Her Catholicism was profound and orthodox, but it was sermon on the mount Catholicism, leavened with a profound compassion and a down-to-earth understanding of human frailty.
Though she could be scathing - about bigoted judges and corrupt policemen, about former allies who took the Establishment shilling - she was not morally judgmental.
When the wife of one long-term prisoner became pregnant, Sister Sarah nodded and said, "Well, one pregnancy in eight years isn't so bad, I suppose."
The 1974 introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the waves of arrests orchestrated by Special Branch created an atmosphere of fear in the Irish community. Sister Sarah devoted herself to arranging legal representation, visiting prisons, and ferrying confused and traumatised relatives from Ireland between airports and jails in her little silver Honda - she was possibly the most erratic driver in London.
In 1988, when she was in her late 60s, the Home Office banned her, on unspecified security grounds, from attending the first marriage of Paul Hill, wrongly convicted for the Guildford bombings, in Long Lartin Prison, a distinction that irked but also not so secretly tickled her.
No case outraged her more than that of Guiseppe Conlon, arrested in 1974 after he came to London to visit his son Gerry, then under interrogation for the Guildford bombings. Guiseppe, a much respected Belfast working-class family man, was desperately ill, and, sentenced to 12 years, a vindictive Home Office ensured that he was to die in prison. Sister Sarah would tell anyone who would listen that Guiseppe and his co-defendants were innocent but very few in those days, barring solicitor Gareth Peirce, and Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Chris Mullin, and John McDonnell - now also a Labour MP, would listen or act.
In an interview in The Irish Times in 1996 she spoke of her first meeting with Guiseppe Conlon: "The old man's name was Guiseppe Conlon, a man that meant little to me then but was to haunt me for the rest of my life. I had been asked to visit this man but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of him as he came in - an emaciated old man, gasping for air. 'I am an innocent man,' he said to me. I was very worried, I had never seen a prisoner so ill. He was almost crushed and broken. With every breath he said, 'I am an innocent man,' and then he would say he had faith in British justice, as I myself did at the time."
Sister Sarah's love of art was an important counter-balance. She studied at the College of Art in Dublin, Chelsea College of Art and the National Gallery in London from 1965 to 1969. She was intrigued by the bohemian world she found at Chelsea. She formed a lasting friendship with her graphics tutor, Edward Wright and his family. One of Wright's works hangs in the Camden flat that she moved to after leaving Highgate convent in the early 1990s.
Dogged by ill health for much of her life, she was determined not to be forced into a home. In her last days, her mind turned increasingly back to her family and to her childhood. Shortly before the end she said, "I must go up the hill now and meet my mother."
Her dying wish was to be buried beside her brother Michael in Galway; her wish was granted.
Sarah Clarke (Sister Mary Auxilus): born 1919; died, February 2002