Birmingham Six lawyer celebrated

Guildford Four member Gerry Conlon told an audience in Camden last night that even a century from now, people would still remember Gareth Peirce’s achievements as a human rights campaigner. Conlon went on say that Peirce’s work with ‘the new Irish, the Muslim community’ was testament to this lifelong commitment to fighting injustice.

ICPO: 25 years working for
the dignity of Irish prisoners

Even to this day, more than 36 years since their arrest in 1974, the case of the Birmingham Six still resonates as a powerful cautionary tale of institutional mendacity. Central to exposing that top-down dishonesty was the tireless work carried out by Ms Pierce and her peerless legal team.

It was appropriate therefore that Gareth Peirce was the recipient of this ICPO award as the 20^th anniversary of the Six’s release approaches.

Camden Town’s Baltic weather conditions didn’t deter the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO) from holding its 25^th anniversary celebrations in the London Irish Centre last night. Even the late cancellation of the event’s headlining entertainment act Altan couldn’t take the shine off an evening that was in any event, all about the people who couldn’t be there; the prisoners.

Ms Peirce was presented with a plaque inscribed with a passage from the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and accepted her award with characteristic humility and understated (but never doubted) kinship and solidarity with the Irish of Britain.

Praising the work of the ICPO over the past quarter century, Peirce’s acceptance speech would have resonated deeply in that room. Since its inception, the ICPO has always worked closely with Irish prisoners maintaining their innocence and by extension, its relationship with Pierce goes back a long way and not just with the media-vaunted cases like ‘the Four’ and ‘the Six’.

Conlon: still campaigning against injustice

And even though the problems facing Irish prisoners in English gaols are in some ways different to those which the ICPO was founded to tackle, there some issues that remind you that it is ‘Nothing but the same old story’...

Earlier this week in the Commons, Tory MP Philip Hollobone had called for the removal from the UK of Irish prisoners back to Irish gaols in return for the proposed £7bn digout.

In a nice display of parliamentary show-boating, Hollobone was apt to wonder that “given that we are about to lend them more than £7 billion [€8.3 billion], could the Irish Republic be persuaded to pay for the incarceration of these people by taking them back to jails in their own country?”

Only 14 Irish prisoners were repatriated to complete their sentences in the Republic/Free State this year. David 'Call me Dave' Cameron responded by promising to get old Hush Puppies over in the Ministry of Justice to look further into the matter.

But this is a tangled and thorny issue and one which has absorbed the ICPO for some time, on an operational as well as a policy level.

Now, on one reading, Irish prisoners should be no different in law to any other prisoners from within the EU. So, strictly speaking, Irish prisoners should be subject to the same provisions.


That doctrine is set to be tested next year when a European Union prisoner transfer agreement comes into force. Dispensing with the need for prisoner consent, the new rules could enable the forced repatriation of many more people to EU countries.

But there is another consideration and that is the nature of the relationship between people from Ireland and their (UK) constitutional status while resident in Britain.

One of the corollaries of the 800 year-long danse-macabre between our two nations is that Irish people have ‘earned’, if you like, a form of ‘associate citizenship’ status which confers various rights on Irish nationals not available to other EU citizens in the UK.


This includes the right to vote in general elections and among other things, a general presumption against the deportation of Irish nationals resident in the jurisdiction. This relationship confers rights in mirror image to UK citizens resident in Ireland.

This presumption proved rather problematic during The Troubles when significant numbers of imprisoned Volunteers were trying to get home to serve their sentences in the Free State.


But nowadays, this exceptional status tends generally to be to the advantage of the many Irish people who have put down roots and are rearing families in Britain. To deport a prisoner in those circumstances would rightly be seen as a cruel and undue hardship on a family who had committed no crime.

That notwithstanding, there are notable exceptions and off the top of his head, the Deptford Croppy could pick out at least a score of case files he’s viewed where a person, either in the course of their job (eg lorry driver) or passing through a UK airport on holiday (then arrested on an old warrant), is locked up in this country while families await their release in another.

The law, as it stands in the UK is a mischief. By according Irish nationals this ‘special status’, UK law is actually depriving prisoners of rights to which they are legally entitled as European citizens.

Human rights lawyer Peirce

But working with prisoners has a serious image problem. Unless you are one of those perennial death-row widows of TV documentary fame, prison is not sexy subject. Don’t even get me started on the shocking treatment of Irish travellers in British gaols. (The Croppy reserves the right to revisit that particular issue in greater detail in the not too distant....)

And let’s have it right, there will always be enough ‘closet Daily Mail-opinion holders’ out there to make acceptable the belief that somehow, prisoners are not a category of society to trouble over if they are not receiving their due respect and dignity as human beings.

Again, all of this merely underlines the importance of an organisation like the ICPO with its working ethos of non-judgemental compassion and determined resistance to gaol’s dehumanising regime.