PÁDRAIGÍN DRINAN - LAWYER PLOUGHS A LONELY FURROW

June 6, 2005 - (Daily Ireland) Belfast solicitor extraordinaire Pádraigín Drinan still can’t decide whether to go to Craigavon Civic Centre in Co Armagh on Tuesday when the inquiry begins into the murder of her close friend Rosemary Nelson. It’s not that she doesn’t want the inquiry to start. She does — desperately. But, along with others, she has growing concerns about its powers and independence.

The Rosemary Nelson inquiry will be held under the restrictive terms of the Police Act. Whatever private assurances the British government may have given, no report may ever be published and parts of the inquiry may be held in secret.
It is symptomatic of Drinan’s entire professional and personal life that she has burrowed away to ascertain precisely what powers the inquiry will have. Resistance to authority and orthodoxies in all their guises (even republican ones) is the key to unlocking her personality.

Her most recent battle was with the Law Society, the professional body for all the North's solicitors, which has been trying — so far unsuccessfully — to close her down on the grounds of administrative failings.
She says these grounds have yet to be produced in writing and were made at a hearing where she was not present to defend herself. “I still don't know what their charges were,” she says, although she has received an apology.
There was an immediate outcry from those she represents — people that other solicitors usually shy away from (Travellers, asylum seekers, victims of domestic abuse). The complaint was then staved off, although not entirely beaten.
She says it was heartening when groups and individuals as varied as a Belfast Travellers group, Baroness Helena Kennedy (former British Labour Party leader in the House of Lords), the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre, the Anti-Racism Network, a police officer from Kilkeel in Co Down and others wrote in support of her.

The Law Society told her to inform her clients to find other solicitors. Easier said than done. Most could not get anyone and many ended up at the society's own door asking for help. “They were overwhelmed,” she says.
Some wrote to the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Brian Kerr. His private view is believed to be that it may have been ill-advised to try to remove a unique professional from the scene.

Drinan admits that, when closure seemed likely, she felt a sense of guilty relief — that a burden had been lifted off her shoulders. When she realised that her clients were then without advice, she quickly resolved to take up the reins again.

“Victims of various forms of assault or injustice were coming to me who could find no other solicitor to act on their behalf. There's no money in those sort of cases,” she says.
It was the latest episode in a life characterised by non-violent protest against the forces of the state and any other group that threatened human rights.

Not that Drinan is any stranger to physical violence. Back in 1969, her collarbone was fractured when an infuriated Paisleyite hit her with a blackthorn stick during the Burntollet civil rights march in Co Derry.
“I can still remember the face of the man who hit me. I thought that maybe if I stood my ground, he wouldn't hit me. I was wrong. He lifted the stick high above his head and brought it down.”
As advocate for various nationalist residents' groups, she has also been eyewitness to more than enough street violence. Her life has also been repeatedly threatened by loyalist paramilitaries.
After a long battle with the Northern Ireland Office and the police, she was finally put on the Key Persons Protection Scheme. Her home was fortified, but she got fed up of feeling vulnerable.
“Getting off the bus on the Lisburn Road [in south Belfast], there were so many hostile faces. I didn't realise how awful it was until I left.”

Barely five feet (1.52 metres) tall in her stockinged feet, gentle-faced and softly spoken, Drinan hardly looks like a frontline warrior in the battle for human rights.

Currently renting a house in Poleglass, a nationalist estate on the western outskirts of Belfast, she is hoping to buy a new home in Andersonstown in the west of the city. If she does move there, it will be full circle to where she was born nearly 60 years ago.

Her mother ran a bar where the Divis Tower now stands. Her father, born in Cork, taught Irish at St Malachy's College. While at St Dominic's College on the Falls Road, she worked on a voluntary basis for Gerry Fitt, who was representing the Republican Labour Party.

After her A levels, she studied law at Queen's University, where she joined People's Democracy. “It was an exciting time to be young. I got hit regularly but you didn't feel pain because you were so hyped up at what was happening around you.”

When other friends became involved in the resurgent IRA, Drinan did not. Why? “I genuinely believed that, if you had right on your side, you would win in the end."

Believing, like Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, that the law could be used in a non-violent way to change the state, she became a solicitor. At least it meant she could visit her friends, “nearly all of whom had been lifted” — interned in Long Kesh.

She was an official witness for the Irish government in its European Court of Human Rights case on the ill treatment of detainees and also represented the families of the Bloody Sunday victims at the original Widgery tribunal.
“With hindsight, of course, you could say we should never have taken part but, at the time, people really wanted the story to come out in public. We worked 20 hours a day, every day, for six weeks straight. It was dreadful when he
brought in his verdict.”

She represented Irish National Liberation Army chief of staff Dominic McGlinchey in an appeal against a murder conviction, becoming a firm friend. “The media portrait just isn't him. He was persuasive, intelligent,” Drinan remembers.
She is still close to Declan and Dominic Jr, the two orphaned sons of Dominic and Mary McGlinchey. Drinan has never married or had children and the McGlinchey boys are close to her heart.
Her friendship with Rosemary Nelson began when both were acting for various nationalist residents' groups in their entanglements with the Orange Order over disputed parades.
The two women would collaborate, dovetailing their work to avoid duplication. Both women saw their profession as a vocation and the law as the means to an end.

“We would chat and swap stories on the phone and meet to compare notes. It was great to be with someone who was interested in the same areas of law as I am and I still miss her greatly,” says Drinan.
When the Law Society struck, Drinan’s supporters quickly exploited the internet to begin a campaign. Their initial email read, in part: “She has won landmark human-rights cases, campaigning for major changes in legislation for women and the victims of sectarianism, racism and child abuse.

“Pádraigín has been a thorn in the side of the establishment for every possible reason — all of them good. She has never fitted the image that people hold of lawyers. She is far from rich and travels mainly by bus.”
Drinan has also become involved in causes outside Ireland, working with lawyers on human-rights abuses in Guantánamo Bay and with others at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in the Gaza Strip.
A long-running local battle was with the Housing Executive over the rights to emergency accommodation for asylum seekers and victims of racial abuse.
She and her staff also picketed a rental agency in south Belfast that advocated racist vetting.

Her office handles dozens of immigration and refugee cases, many of which will never result in payment because Legal Aid is not applicable and many clients have no money.
Drinan also ploughs a solitary political furrow. She has clashed with Sinn Féin, saying it is a “top-down” organisation incapable of tolerating dissent.

“They don't trust me because I won't do what they say. None of us know what behind-scenes deals have been agreed between Sinn Féin and the British government. The DUP are right to say the nationalist consensus is in disarray because no one knows or trusts what's going on.”

There are small victories, though. Just this week, she managed to free an Irish-born 14-month-old toddler who had been arrested at Heathrow under immigration law.

She then managed to get the child's father out of jail where he too was languishing on immigration charges. When the family visited her to thank her, the child sprinkled potato crisps all over the office.
Such cases are routine, she says. She complains also about the tendency of social workers to follow book rules rather than assess each case before removing children from their natural parents.
Working with such emotionally charged cases, can she compartmentalise her professional and private life? “No,” she admits without a thought. “You're conscious of it all the time. But I'll keep on going.”

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