Imagine this scenario: your brother is coming home from a dance. He is with two female cousins and a friend. At a junction in the centre of town, he is "jumped" by a mob of between 40 and 50 men. They rain down punches and kicks upon him, punctuated by shouts like *Die you fenian bastard, die!* The crowd only stops the assault when your cousins throw themselves on top of your brother's body. By that time he has been so badly injured, he will never regain full consciousness. He dies within a fortnight.
Now add in another sinister element to the horror: within yards of where the assault takes place, four police officers sit in an RUC landrover. They are armed, and could presumably disperse the crowd if they so wish. They don't. Instead, they stay where they are, only emerging from the van when an ambulance arrives to take your brother to hospital.
It sounds like a nightmare. For Diane Hamill it is reality.
Diane's brother, Robert, was 25 years old when he was attacked in April 1997. He died on 8th May. In the intervening months, she has campaigned to find out the truth about his murder. Progress has been slow but steady. Her family, who consider it unlikely that the authorities will secure a conviction for Robert's death, want to bring a private prosecution. Michael Mansfield QC, who appeared for the Birmingham Six and is currently representing the family of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, has already offered his services free. Other groups such as British-Irish Rights Watch are following the case with interest.
Diane is a quietly-spoken woman, who lives in the family home in Portadown. She talks poignantly of the care Robert lavished upon his two young sons. A daughter was born after his death. Asked if his children have any comprehension of what has happened she replies, *They know that bad boys got their Daddy.*
Robert Hamill grew up in a family of ten, living in the Obins Street area of the town. Diane describes the family as "close" and says of her late brother, "I suppose out of us, all Robert would have been the sporty one. He would have played GAA and he would have gone to the greyhound racing with Dad. Once the children were born, though, his whole life changed. They were at the centre of it."
Portadown is one of the most fiercely sectarian towns in Northern Ireland. Pubs, clubs and streets can be easily classified. They are either Protestant or Catholic. On the night her brother was beaten he was returning home from St. Patrick's Hall, a century-old building, which has long served as a centre of social activity for the town's Catholic community. Unfortunately for him, on leaving St. Patrick's, he was unwittingly set on a collision course with a group of men emerging from The Coach, the local "Protestant" watering-hole.
As far as Diane understands events, her brother and his three friends were walking towards the junction of Thomas Street, Woodhouse Street and Market Street. If they had reached Woodhouse Street they would have been back in "Catholic" territory. Ahead of them they saw a small group of men loitering. They also, though, saw the RUC landrover parked nearby. Making the mistake of thinking that this would guarantee their safety, they pressed on. They were then attacked by a much larger group, who inflicted Robert's fatal injuries.
Diane, a nurse, was working night-shift in a residential home when her mother contacted her. She was in a state of near-hysteria, just having heard of the attack on her son. Diane's initial reaction was one of disbelief: "Mum was saying, 'Robert was beat up! Robert was beat up!' I told her that she must be wrong. I thought nobody could hurt our Robert. I mean, Robert was 6 ft tall and very strong. I didn't think anyone could harm him. But mum was shouting, 'There were 40 or 50 of them. He couldn't do anything. The police didn't help him.' "
A phone call to the local hospital gave dreaded confirmation. Robert was already being transferred to the neurological unit of Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital, in an attempt to deal with the collosal brain damage he had suffered. Diane's recollection of the following days has pin-sharp clarity: "He never really regained consciousness. The hospital described him as 'semi-conscious'. On the 9th and 10th day he started to open his eyes. On the 11th day he opened his eyes completely, but he still wasn't really seeing us."
In extreme physical distress, Robert Hamill died the next day.
Such a tragedy would be diificult enough for the Hamill familty to bear, even if it were not exacerbated by the contentious actions of the RUC. The police seem unable to provide a convincing account of what happened on the night of the attack. Initially they gave scant details, simply referring to a fight between rival gangs in which two men [Robert and his friend, Gregory Girvan] had sustained "head injuries". Later, coming under increasing pressure to justify the conduct of their officers, they said that they had "intervened" but were beaten back by the ferocity of the gangs. After Robert's death, the story changed again: now they conceded that Hamill had been the victim of an "unprovoked, sectarian assault", but that the officers nearby had been "unaware" of what was happening.
Their ignorance is surprising. It has now been accepted that ten minutes before the fatal events took place, a man had warned the police that Protestants coming out of The Coach and Catholics leaving St. Patrick's would inevitably meet. The RUC did nothing to avert this. As Robert was being kicked to death, his cousins were screaming for help. Diane Hamill estimates the police landrover was 15 yards away. Again, it seems no action was taken.
Diane wrote to Mo Mowlam demanding answers. The Secretary of State assured her that the inconsistent police statements were not evidence of a plot to withold the truth. They were, she insisted, genuine mistakes. It is difficult to give such assurances much credence. Constable Alan Neill, one of the four police officers at the scene, was recently called to give evidence at the committal hearing of Paul Hobson, who is charged with the murder. Despite the RUC having accepted that Hamill was the victim of an unprovoked attack, Neill reverted once again to the idea that *rival gangs* were taunting each other.
He also referred to another eye-witness. After the attack a man had rushed up to him: "He was saying we had sat and watched it happening and that we had done nothing," Neill said, before adding, "I did not know what he was referring to."
According to Diane Hamill, the police investigation only seriously began when her brother died. Because this was almost two weeks after the beating, it was virtually impossible to get forensic evidence which would stand up in court. Of six men originally charged with the murder, all bar Paul Hobson have been released.
The behaviour of the police in relation to Hamill's murder is questionable, at best. The attitude of some within Portadown's loyalist community to his family is abhorrent. Intimidation of the Hamills began in the immediate aftermath of Robert's murder. His family would attach flowers to a lampost close to the scene. They attached a new bunch each morning. They had to. Every evening the floral tributes disappeared. As Diane puts it, "it was as if they wanted to remove every trace of what had happened; as if nobody wanted to remember Robert."
The proximity of the Hamill family home to a loyalist area leaves them open to overt sectarian hatred. Diane relates one incident: "One day I saw that someone had tied a white handkerchief around the lampost. I couldn't figure out what it was about. Then later a fella came up to my mum saying stuff like 'What about Robert? What about Robert Hamill?' He was pretending to be holding someone by the hair and kicking them in the face. And then he started shouting 'Get your handkerchief! Wipe your tears!' "
The process of putting up the flowers only to have them removed again became too distressing for her mother, so they stopped putting them up. Later, during the loyalist marching season, Diane was therefore surprised to see a bouquet and a card attached once again to the lampost. At the time all six of the people originally charged were still in custody.
"I saw the flowers, and I thought 'Oh, some kind soul must have put those there'," she recalls. "Then I looked at the card. In red and blue marker they had written 'To the Portadown Six Heroes'. That was the 13th July. There had been people marching up and down that street all day, and not one of them had the guts to take it down."
Most stomach-churning of all was a story related by a near neighbour of the Hamills. From the adjoing loyalist area they had heard a young man loudly proclaiming his involvement in the attack on Robert. *He was shouting about how he had jumped up and down on his head, and how his head had gone 'squelch, squelch, squelch.' *
The question of how this makes the Hamill family feel hardly needs to be asked. "Horrendous,* says Diane. *I couldn't even begin to explain it."
Just as distressing, and perhaps more ominous, is the RUC intimidation which Diane Hamill claims the family have been subjected to since Robert's death. Examples are plentiful:
"One of my brothers was standing talking to a couple of girls. The police drove up right beside where he was standing and just stared at him. Another time he was with some mates, on the street near our home. A whole load of police got out of the landrover and lined up across the street with their batons drawn."
On another occasion Diane actually pointed out a retreating figure who had been verbally abusing her family to a female police officer. "She said 'No problem, Diane, we'll go and talk to him.' I walked away, and when I turned back they had driven off in the opposite direction."
Despite the obstacles they face, the Hamill family are determined to see their campaign through to a satisfactory conclusion.
"To me, Robert's case is so open and shut that someday they'll have to tell the truth," Diane insists. "If our family just say 'Oh well Robert's dead', then the RUC will get away with it. I couldn't live with myself if I let this go."
The family hope to prosecute the four RUC officers present on the night of Robert's death for "dereliction of duty, at least". They also hope to bring "as many civilians as we can prove a case against" to answer before the courts for his murder.
Considering the trauma that she has been through, and the treatment which she has received from the police, it is hardly surprising that Diane Hamill's attitudes to the RUC have changed dramatically over the last year:
"I can't believe they are so callous. It says so much about the RUC to me. The one time someone needed their help as much as anyone could have ever needed their help, they weren't prepared to give it. They weren't prepared to fire one bullet into the air to save Robert's life. His life wasn't worth one bullet to them."
Two days before Hot Press interviewed Diane Hamill, Les Rogers, chairman of the Police Federation of Northern Ireland, spoke at that organisation's annual conference. The RUC, he contended, was *the best policing service Northern Ireland could possibly have.*
With the exception of the low number of Catholics in its ranks, he said that there was no need for reform. It is not an analysis with which the family of Robert Hamill would concur.
The Robert Hamill Justice Fund :
Bank of Ireland, Rathfarnham: sort code 90-02-01; acc no 277 577 67
Bank of Ireland, Portadown: sort code: 90-23-54; acc no 266 721 39