Johnny Walker, one of the Birmingham Six, is on a tour of Australia sponsored by the Australian Irish Congress. The six, all Irish, were released earlier this year after 16 years in prison, having been framed for two pub bombings in Birmingham in 1974. The following is excerpted from remarks made by TIM ANDERSON to an October 22 meeting for Walker in Sydney.
John is not simply the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice: he was chosen because he was an Irish person living in a British community. As we know from our own experience, the British legal system is capable of wrongly imprisoning all sorts of people — generally poor and disadvantaged people. What is peculiar about the British system in Britain is that it has an enormous capacity to commit this sort of atrocity against Irish people.
The "troubles" in Ireland impinge on John's case through the deep prejudice and racism against Irish people brought on by centuries-old attempts to legitimise the British occupation of Ireland. Irish people in Britain have for many centuries been portrayed as mad, anarchic (in the derogatory sense of the word), uncivilised, stupid and as of an inferior racial "stock". All these constructions were developed because of the need of the colonisers to legitimise the violence of their military occupation. They are notions that reach very deep into British culture and, through British culture, into some aspects of Australian culture.
Irish people in Britain have long been dehumanised in a remarkably similar way to the degradation of Aboriginal people in this country. The very same constructions of racism, used to justify the Irish occupation, were used in the subsequent occupations in India, China, Africa and Australia. The anti-Aboriginal racism developed in Australia, which was used to justify horrendous massacres as recently as the 1930s, had many of its constructs firmly in place from Britain's experience in Ireland.
This helps explain why both Irish people in England, and Aboriginal people in Australia, suffer far greater than is normal at the hands of the criminal system. Aboriginal imprisonment rates in this state have actually worsened since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody made some recommendations in the opposite direction.
It is not just that colonised peoples are economically disadvantaged, and so more exposed to policing by their class position, though this is important, but also that a racist culture allows repeated and unconscionable acts to be inflicted on people it has defined as less than human.
This anti-Irish racism, which undoubtedly contributed greatly to John's ordeal, is one of two important reasons why the broader Irish dilemma is relevant to us, as Australians. We share that legacy, and we can see all the roots of Australia's anti-Aboriginal racism in the British anti-Irish racism, if we look carefully.
What is important to recognise is the long-term effect of such institutions as the anti-Catholic laws, the "Irish jokes", the English portrayal of Irish people as uncultured and violent, and such things as the English Education Act of 1872, which banned the teaching of the Gaelic language in Ireland (and elsewhere).
What a great example that was for the missionaries of this country who, after the massacres, crushed Aboriginal languages in the mission stations. It was in the name of British "civilisation" that Aboriginal people were forcibly prevented from speaking the "gibberish" of their own rich languages.
Some of those Aboriginal languages are currently being rescued by efforts of their own communities but, so far as I am aware, there rogram on the east coast of Australia designed to assist these rescues: to preserve the original languages of this country. The tradition of cultural dispossession continues.
This was a lesson learned from John's country, where various means were employed to suppress the Gaelic language, including collars designed to choke young children who spoke Gaelic at school.
The second important reason the Irish dilemma is important to us is that the political crisis in the north of Ireland, which successive British governments have sought to criminalise, has fostered a flood of "law and order" imports: policing precedents set in the English system which have flowed through to Australia.
Draconian measures introduced by Britain to criminalise a political struggle now either threaten to take form, or have actually taken form, in Australia's own legal systems.
Four measures which have been imported include:
* The use of paid "supergrasses" — indemnified informers in multiple criminal cases. This practice was discredited in Ireland in the early 1980s, yet the current NSW ICAC inquiry is into precisely this industry.
* The abolition of prison sentence remissions. The British government established this special treatment for political prisoners in Ireland's north in the 1970s, and it has now been introduced for all prisoners in NSW.
* A harsh NSW Summary Offences Act, with provisions such as unauthorised public assemblies, modelled on Thatcher's Public Order Act. In NSW the major pressure for harsher street offences has come from country towns out west, where the vast majority of those prosecuted are Aboriginal.
* Specialist paramilitary police squads, such as (the recently disbanded) SWOS and the TRG, were also modelled on the British paramilitaries. I take no pleasure in recognising that one of the men responsible for my wrongful arrest in 1978 went on to receive a bravery award for his part in that frame-up. He also received a Churchill fellowship to study "terrorism" in Britain and Germany, and came back to head SWOS and preside over the killing of David Gundy in Sydney two years ago.
Four threatened measures include:
I Abolition of the right to silence: more correctly, introduction of the right of a court to draw inferences of guilt from a person's refusing to be interrogated by police. This was enacted in Britain in 1988 under the "terrorist" justification, and has now been proposed here by various police, at least one lawyer and one journalist, either as a trade-off for videotaped interviews, or as a reaction to the supposed "abuse" of unsworn statements and the right to silence in court.
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IDetention without charge, as under the British Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974) and the earlier Special Powers Act, has also been recommended here by the 1989 Gibbs report, which asked the federal government to allow arrest without charge — for "questioning" — for six hours extendible up to 24 hours. I suppose Harry Gibbs didn't have the opportunity to talk to Johnny Walker about what he thinks of police powers to hold suspects and question them for long periods of time.
IAbolition of trial by jury, as in the Diplock court for "special" offences, has now been proposed by the NSW Liberal government for reasons of "efficiency" and cost cutting. A pity they didn't think to cut some of these costs in their $100 million/year prison building capital works budget. IDirect censorship of the media has also recently been introduced in Britain — and also exists in Ireland. But perhaps it's not necessary here due to the high concentration of media ownership and the high degree of self-censorship.
In conclusion, I'd like to let you know that there is ongoing pressure for people who have been through the system and continue to speak out. Arthur Murray, in the audience here tonight, has been subject to harassment and surveillance. This morning police came to my solicitor's offices with a search warrant for files on statements of certain defence witnesses. And John may not like to speak of this, but he has faced death threats back at home and has to be very careful of anything he says on behalf of his own community. n