Few people in
Britain emerge from the Birmingham
Six case with any credit. Pride of place must go to the families of the jailed men, who campaigned to prove their innocence with an incredible tenacity, and in the face of almost universal hostility until the state case began to crumble in the mid-1980s. Then there are the men's lawyers, the tiny handful of investigative journalists who worked to unravel the convictions in a of television series programmes, and the much tinier
The poison of occupation
There are few in Britain who have pointed out that it is the unjust and ultimately untenable British occupation of a part of Ireland that is at the root of the poison which continues to slowly work its way through the British body politic -whether it is through frame-up cases like the Birmingham 6 or the Guildford 4, the continuing saga of the shoot-to-kill policy and army collaboration with loyalist death squads in Ireland itself, the cover-up around the execution of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar, or any of the other scandals that continue to simmer away.
It is not often that six working class Irish nationalists have the ear of the world to denounce British justice for the sham that it is, and the Birmingham Six are determined to use to the full the brief moment they will have to do so. In interviews since their release, they have insistently taken up the cases of others unjustly jailed, and they can be expected to be at the forefront of the campaign against the extradition of Irish prisoners to Britain.
In the words of one of the Six, John Walker; "We must see to it that nobody else has to go through what we went through. There is no justice for Irish people in Britain". *
25