Charlie Hill QC SC was undoubtedly the best civil and constitutional lawyer of his generation. One of a new era of lawyers, who emerged from the educational reforms of 1947, allowing young Catholic working class students to get to grammar school and university. Born in West Belfast on March 22nd, 1936, his father Benjamin Hill, was from Bray, Co Wicklow, and his family moved North in the face of partition. Whilst many of the family later returned South, he settled in Belfast. His mother, Mary Ann Roche was from Coleraine.
Charlie was exceptionally proud of being both a pupil of St Paul’s Primary and St Malachy’s College. From there he went on to read Law at Queen’s University Belfast and obtained an arts degree from Trinity College Dublin. He was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1959 and the Inner Bar in 1974. He was also a member of King’s Inn in Dublin and Gray’s Inn in London. He was senior counsel in Dublin and a bencher of the Inn of Court in Northern Ireland.
His first introduction to the law was as a child reading a book about the great 19th century politician and barrister, Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator. From that moment onwards, he aspired to be a politician and a lawyer. Although tempted by the political life, he forsook it to become a successful barrister over a wide range of law.
In many ways, his career at the Bar reflected the changing political history of Northern Ireland. While Charlie Hill was not involved in party politics, his involvement in so many landmark cases brought him close to the interface with the politics of this place. In a society shamefully divided by injustice, sectarian disharmony and violence, he was personally driven by the need to bring about justice and social improvement through legal and peaceful democratic means. He used his great legal skill and capacity to address such issues, with ingenuity and considerable success.
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In the mid-1960s, Charlie appeared for Fr Mulvey and Pat Friel (Brian Friel ‘s father) in the Derry Housing Enquiry. This was a precursor of the Civil Rights movement in Derry, housing ultimately becoming a critical issue in the emergent civil rights movement, that transformed political life in the North.
In the late 1960s, with a number of other lawyers, he helped to form the Labour Lawyers Society. This group was ancillary to the civil rights movement and included Brian Garrett, the Belfast solicitor, as its chairman. Others included Turlough O’Donnell QC, Judge Pat Markey, Vincent Hanna, (later a prominent BBC broadcaster) and Martin McBurney QC, who was murdered in 1974 in his home by the Provisional IRA because he had become a resident magistrate. Turlough O’Donnell QC, had been Charlie’s Master at the Bar and later became a Lord Justice of Appeal in Northern Ireland. He was also father of Donal O’Donnell, the current Chief Justice.
Charlie also acted for the Catholic residents of Belfast in the Scarman Tribunal investigating the August 1969 disturbances in Belfast and for the families of the victims of the Bloody Sunday killings in January 1972 at the Widgery Tribunal. He regarded Widgery’s findings as perverse. He acted for many of the civil rights leaders, including Eamonn McCann, Austin Currie, Bernadette Devlin, Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin.
In the Re: Mc Elduff case of 1971, involving hundreds of men wrongfully arrested and interned in August 1971, he successfully sued the British government for wrongful arrest and damages.
He represented John Hume and others, in contesting their arrests by the British army during civil disobedience demonstrations in Derry in 1971, in the now famous constitutional case of Hume v Londonderry Justices. This was a watershed legal victory in the NI High Court, that found that the British army was in breach of the Government of Ireland Act 1920, and had acted ultra vires, in so far as the unionist dominated parliament in Stormont had no power to pass regulations under the Special Powers Act, in respect of the British army’s power to arrest. The British government immediately responded by passing an amending Act through parliament in an all-night sitting at Westminster, to indemnify the army’s actions. This case was pivotal in the ultimate withdrawal of security powers from the old Stormont parliament by prime minister, Ted Heath. John Hume thereafter, publicly regarded him as a good friend and key adviser.
He was successfully instructed in Brogan v UK involving breaches of the ECHR heard in Strasbourg in November 1988, over the detention periods for prisoners arising under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Later on, he represented the DUP’s executive minister, Lord Morrow over his ministerial right to see Executive papers despite his absence from Executive meetings. Furthermore, he appeared for Gregory Campbell MP and the Reverend Ian Paisley Senior and his son, Ian Junior. He also successfully appeared for Sammy Wilson, the DUP politician in a ground-breaking privacy case against the Sunday World newspaper.
He was particularly proud of litigating the first asbestosis case and also the first industrial hearing loss case. From those two pioneering cases, sprang thousands of others, thereby giving proper compensation to injured workers and their families.
On the commercial side, Charlie appeared in Raymond Redmond v Pig Marketing Board (Northern Ireland). This important claim was the first case from the UK to be heard in the European Court of Justice and involved the breach of European competition rules.
During the mid-1980s Charlie discretely assisted the Irish government of Garret FitzGerald and Dick Spring in their endeavours to engage with Margaret Thatcher’s government in the preparatory work leading up to the transformative Anglo-Irish Agreement. During this time he formed a strong friendship with the then Irish Labour Attorney General, John Rodgers SC. His efforts contributed to the successful achievement of that agreement in November 1985.
In 1990, outside the Bar, he undertook the sensitive role of chair of the Standing Advisory Committee for Human Rights. This was the precursor to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, and under his leadership, SACHR inter alia, pursued the aim of drafting a separate Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. Charlie rightly saw Human Rights law as being a central element in resolving our problems here.
Although a Belfast man, his great love was for Co Donegal, which, as he put it, was his real home. He enjoyed many happy summers travelling to his house near Falcarragh.
He was widely read and a great supporter of Irish artists, as well as an art collector. He had an acute interest in the environment, and an encyclopedic knowledge of native Irish trees, particularly those that could survive the harsh conditions in Donegal.
Charlie lived a good and fulfilled life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice and peace through the awesome power of the law. He retired from the Bar at the age of 79. He was not simply a professional lawyer, but a man who knew, as a believing Christian, he could and should, change things for the good, which he did, and did to the utmost of his considerable ability.
He never recovered from the death of his wife Kathleen in 2010. He had four children, Kathryn, Niall, Alan and the late Charles, who died in July last year. He was immensely proud of them and their achievements. He also had six grandchildren Melissa, Daniel, Rebecca, Lauryn, Caoilainn and Rachael, whom he adored.
