Britain's Abu Ghraib

MUA Youth Conference

They’re Irish, not Iraqis, but what 

Gerry Conlon and Paddy Hill
suffered under the British prison
system rivals Abu Ghraib.
“They made me strip naked then all
gathered round and took the piss
out of me,” Gerry Conlon, a member
of the Guildford Four told 70 wide-
eyed young maritime workers
attending the recent MUA youth
conference in Brisbane. “They all
spat on me and they all slapped me
and then they marched me naked to
a cell that had no windows in it.
‘Stand up you dirty stinking Irish
bastard’ they said.
“They’d bring in policewomen and
encourage them to grab my testicles
and twist them and pull on them and
spit on me. It was all part of the
humiliation.”
Gerry Conlon and three other
young people were ‘fitted’ for
terrorist bombings in Guildford in
1974. They were tortured,
sentenced to life imprisonment
and kept in prison even after the
real bombers were found.
Gerry and Paddy Hill, a member of
theBirmingham Six (another group
wrongfully convicted of terrorism
offences by British courts) toured
Australia courtesy of the WA Branch
of the MUA to promote the
Miscarriages of Justice Organisation
(MOJO) a human rights group they
set up to assist innocent people both
in prison and after their release.
Paddy and Gerry spoke in Sydney and
Melbourne union rooms in December.
Paddy said his experience in many
ways was worse after he was
released from prison.
“Suddenly you’d be sitting in the
house and you’d be reading the
paper or something. And the next
you know the f…ing paper is coming
apart at the seams ‘cause the paper
is soaking wet,”he recalled. “You are
sitting there crying and you don’t
even realise that you’re crying, you
don’t realise how long you’ve been
crying for and most important of all
you don’t even know what the f…
you are crying for.”