Nightmare keeps on going round in your head and nobody gives a f*** Man wrongly convicted of 1974 pub bombing tells of his ordeal and mission to help others
PADDY HILL REVEALS STRUGGLE
than when I came out. I would just burst into tears, I didn’t know what was happening, I thought I was going f***ing mad. I’d be crying for two to three days non-stop.
“I’ve a bad sleeping pattern even now. I wake up and the sweat and the adrenaline is pumping through you at 100mph and every single one of your nerves is like they are being stretched.
“The nightmare keeps going round and round in your head 24/7 and nobody gives a f***.”
Ten years after his release Paddy founded MOJO and revealed his anger is now about others when he hears their stories of injustice.
He said: “There are more innocent people in prison today than there was in my day, a hell of a lot more. The reason they don’t help us is because that would be an admission of guilt.”
One of the first people helped by MOJO was Glasgow-born Robert Brown who spent 25 years in prison for a murder in Manchester he didn’t commit.
Brown also features in the documentary and revealed: “The police took the opportunity from me to build a new life with my girlfriend. It affected her as well.
“She died of alcohol poisoning at 35 years of age. The amount of time that I served would, in all honesty, damage anybody. The deprivation, the degradation, to live without any Paddy Hill in RTE’S Fallout sort of affection.” Fifteen years after his release in 2002 he lives in a one-room “prison cell” and struggles to sleep. He said: “At night time I just walk up and down, it is a constant kaleidoscope of thoughts about what they did to me. I go through that process until my head is that tired of thinking about it I just conk out for a couple of hours.” Fallout also features Peter Pringle, the last man to be sentenced to death in Ireland in 1980, and his wife Sunny Jacobs who served 17 years on death row in the US. The couple now run the Sunny Center in Galway where they offer a programme of support for others who’ve been wrongfully imprisoned. Peter revealed: “After I came out I needed to grieve for the life I might have had if I hadn’t gone to prison.
“I had the three blackest weeks of my life. But the only way to deal with grief is to go through it. I’m free of it now.”
Sunny added: “When I came out I had no home, I had nothing, just a cardboard box with my belongings in it. I had to start again.
“But it gets to the point where you ask, ‘Do you want to live with your misery, do you want to be your misery, or do you want to move on?’”
Fallout is on RTE One at 10.15pm this Thursday.
sylvia.pownall@trinitymirror.com
I’ve a bad sleeping pattern even how.. I wake up and the adrenaline is pumping PADDY HILL ON HIS ONGOING TRAUMA