Robert Hamill was 25 years old. He was walking home with friends from a Saturday-night dance at St. Patrick's Hall, in his own town, on the main street, at around 1:30 in the morning of 27 April 1997. At the intersection of Market and Thomas Streets in Portadown, a crowd of around thirty loyalists who had just come off a bus from a nightclub in Banbridge attacked Hamill and his friends. Four officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, sitting in an armoured Land Rover about twenty feet away, did not get out. Robert Hamill died of a fractured skull eleven days later in hospital. He had four children. He had been on his way home.
Robert Hamill grew up in a Catholic family in Portadown, a town his community had lived in for generations. The week of his death was the worst week of his sister Diane's life, and the beginning of a campaign she would still be running more than two decades later. Robert's wife, Joanne, was his cousin. They had four children together. He worked as a farm labourer. There is almost nothing public-facing about the rest of his short life because that is not why anyone in the wider world knows his name. They know it because of what happened to him, and because of what did not happen to anyone else as a result. His family insisted, year after year, that he be remembered as a person, not a case. The town is small. They knew him as Robert.
The attack on the night of 27 April 1997 happened on the main shopping street of Portadown. Witnesses described a large group of loyalists kicking and stamping on Robert Hamill's head while he lay on the ground. Joanne Garvin, the wife of one of Hamill's friends, and her sister-in-law Siobhán Garvin, ran the few yards to the police Land Rover and screamed at the four constables inside to intervene. They did not. The autopsy gave the cause of death as "Diffuse Brain Injury associated with Fracture of Skull due to Blows to the Head." The trial judge, Mr. Justice McCollum, later said in court that the killing was a sectarian act, with a large number of loyalists attacking a small number of nationalists. He could not, however, determine whether the police had left their Land Rover at all. The contemporary tension in Portadown was high. The Drumcree parade dispute, the long-running argument over whether the Orange Order had the right to march through a Catholic neighbourhood, was at its most volatile.
Six Portadown men were charged with murder in May 1997. By November 1997, charges against five of them had been dropped. The sole man tried, Paul Marc Hobson, was acquitted of murder in 1999 but convicted of unlawful fighting and affray, for which he received a four-year sentence. The chief prosecution witness was Constable Robert Cecil Atkinson of the RUC, one of the four officers in the Land Rover that night. Within days of the killing, Atkinson had been overheard by his wife telephoning a household linked to one of the murder suspects in what witnesses said was a warning to dispose of evidence. He denied it. The case against him would take twenty-seven years to resolve.
The Hamill family's solicitor was Rosemary Nelson, a human rights lawyer from Lurgan who had taken on a string of difficult cases related to police conduct in the Drumcree area. She was assassinated by a loyalist car bomb outside her home on 15 March 1999, while the Hamill case was still going through the courts. Her killing too became the subject of a public inquiry into possible collusion between the security forces and the paramilitaries who killed her. Diane Hamill, Robert's sister, picked up the campaign and carried it for two more decades. She spoke publicly about RUC officers blocking her car in parking lots and following her on foot through Portadown's shops. The Robert Hamill Inquiry, recommended by the Cory Collusion Inquiry, was held to examine whether the police on the scene had failed to protect Robert Hamill and whether the subsequent investigation had been deliberately frustrated.
On 18 April 2024, Robert Cecil Atkinson, by then a former RUC reserve officer, pleaded guilty at Craigavon Crown Court to conspiring to pervert the course of justice in relation to the police investigation into Robert Hamill's killing. He had spent nearly thirty years denying it. On 14 June 2024 he was sentenced to twelve months in prison. Judge Patrick Lynch addressed him in court: "You have been a disgrace to your uniform and have continued to serve as a police officer for years afterwards as a criminal - for there is no other description for you." Twenty-seven years had passed since Robert Hamill was beaten on Market Street. No one had ever been convicted of his murder. The Hamill family's response was measured. Diane Hamill said the conviction was "a step." It was not, she said, justice.
Portadown today is a working town, with a Saturday-morning shopping crowd much like it was in 1997. The intersection of Market and Thomas Streets is still where it was. There is no memorial plaque on the pavement. There does not need to be one; the Hamill family will not let the killing be forgotten, and neither will many of their neighbours. The case became a reference point for the broader peace-process question of how Northern Ireland would deal with the unfinished business of the Troubles: with police misconduct, with sectarian violence that did not stop after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, with the families who kept asking the same questions for thirty years. Robert Hamill was a young father walking home. The story is also the story of the people who refused to let his name disappear.
The killing took place at the intersection of Market Street and Thomas Street in central Portadown, at approximately 54.42°N, 6.44°W. The town sits on the River Bann in north County Armagh. Best viewed at 2,500-4,000 ft. Nearest airports: Belfast International (EGAA) about 17 nm northeast, Dublin (EIDW) about 65 nm south. The site is at the heart of the historic Drumcree parade route; the Drumcree parish church lies less than a mile north on the western bank of the Bann.