I WAS but a wee wean, contentedly watching The Wombles when Gerry Conlon was arrested in November 1974 at his Belfast home. He was 20 and had just returned from London. He had left his native Belfast—as so many young people did—to seek work and leave behind the violence and troubles. Gerry would never know his decision to leave Belfast would seal his fate and guarantee his face would be forever recognised as one who endured immense suffering due to a huge miscarriage of justice. Nor indeed that a film would be made about his life and the lead role played by Oscar winner Daniel Day Lewis.
Gerry was the product of a happy marriage between dad Giuseppe, a factory worker, and mum, Sarah a cleaner, growing up in an impoverished, but extremely close-knit community of the infamous Falls Road. He scraped through primary at Raglan Street and later St Peter’s Secondary where he found himself demoted from class 1C to 1D, finding many fellow pupils too studious for his liking. Class 1C learned Gaelic and Irish history. He reflected that had he stayed in that class he might have gained a greater awareness of Irish history and a more defined Republican point of view. Instead, he clattered his way through his early years a bit of a delinquent, but considering the context of his social conditions, this is no surprise.
He made a couple of brief visits to London to escape trouble, once staying with his uncle, Patrick Maguire and his wife Annie. Then in the summer of 1974 Gerry and his old school pal, Paul Hill went to London together and laboured on the building sites, moving between a hostel and a hippy squat doing casual drugs. There they made casual acquaintance with another Belfast man, Patrick Armstrong and his 17-year-old English girlfriend Carole Richardson.
Gerry returned home on October 19, 1974. On October 5 and November 7 respectively, the IRA left no-warning bombs at two pubs frequented by military personnel in Guildford, Surrey; five people were killed and 65 injured. A panicked Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, introduced the temporary Prevention of Terrorism Act, which allowed police to hold suspects without charge for a week, an emergency legislation that was rushed through parliament allowing suspects to be held without rights to legal representation. The police arrested random members of the London Irish community, including Paul Hill, who following days of physical and mental torture was forced into confessing to the bombings.
On November 30, 1974 Gerry was arrested in Belfast, dragged from his bed by grease painted faces and beaten senseless by members of the RUC. He was taken to London into the custody of Surrey police, whose week long interrogation included further beatings, being stripped naked and deprived of sleep. He was hooded and cuffed and dragged naked down a country lane where he was hit over the head with a gun and had it forced into his mouth and the trigger pulled. Following threats against his mother and sister, Gerry was also forced into confessing. Gerry and Paul’s confessions were repeatedly changed and resubmitted to them to minimise contradictions; the police named Paddy and Carole—who were also pressurised into signing confessions—and other acquaintances who had been released after refusing to confess. Gerry, Paul, Paddy and Carole became known as the Guildford Four and were convicted on October 22, 1975, They were sentenced to life in prison and at their trial the judge, Lord John Donaldon said: “If hanging were still an option you would have been executed.”
Scapegoats
In 1974, the IRA’s bombing campaign in mainland Britain was causing increasing fear and panic and the people and press were angry, with repeated calls, inside and outside parliament for the return of capital punishment. Irish people in England hid their accents in public; they were spat at in the streets, beaten up outside pubs. There were even multiple attacks on Irish homes.
I recently watched a disturbing clip of Gerry from his last ever public speech made at Trinity College, Dublin for Afri (Action from Ireland for human rights and global justice) talking about his experiences and it brought me to tears, such was the brutality he and the others bore and the impact this continued to have on them all for years. For not only was he tortured, but a group of his relatives, collectively known as the ‘Maguire Seven.’ were convicted of being key components in the bombing campaign and also spent decades in prison. Among them his father, Giuseppe, who had travelled to London from Belfast to help him mount a legal defence, was arrested, charged, convicted and subsequently died an innocent man in prison in 1980. Gerry’s mother would travel from Belfast to visit both husband and son who were held in separate prisons, only to find Gerry had been moved elsewhere. They wouldn’t notify her. Also his Uncle Paddy and Auntie Annie were arrested and charged—accused of running a bomb factory in their own home. Their sons, 16 and 13 at the time were held in solitary confinement, something they remember vividly.
It wasn’t until 1991 the Maguire Seven were exonerated, although by this time they had all served their sentences in full. The truth came out that scientists had falsely asserted that the hands of each defendant had tested positive for nitroglycerine.
In Gerry’s case, the burial of a statement proving he could not have been anywhere but at a hostel in Kilburn, north-west London at the time of the bombings became crucial in proving his innocence. Following Gerry’s arrest, a statement was taken providing Gerry with an alibi, but was hidden in police files with a note attached saying, “Not to be shown to the defence.” Even more inconveniently, the IRA unit that had carried out the bombing along with some 60 other attacks had instructed their lawyers three years later, in 1977, that four innocent people had been wrongly charged. The court of appeal heard first-hand the testimony of that IRA unit—they were responsible and no one else. Nonetheless, the four were sent back to prison for another 12 years. It wasn’t until October 19, 1989, that the Guildford Four were vindicated and freed after the Court of Appeal in London ruled that police had fabricated the handwritten interrogation notes used in the conviction. Crucial evidence proving Conlon could not have carried out the bombings had been held back by the police.
Emerging from the Court of Appeal as a free man, Conlon said: “I have been in prison for something I did not do. I am totally innocent. The Maguire Seven are innocent. Let’s hope the Birmingham Six are freed.” Conlon was represented by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, who also secured the release of the Birmingham Six.
Trauma response
Following his release (above) Conlon had problems adjusting to civilian life, suffering two nervous breakdowns and attempting suicide. For years he fell into an abyss from which he could not climb out, hiding like a recluse in a tiny apartment in Plymouth, Devon, knowing no one, physically and mentally broken. Unable to find his way he resorted to drugs. Finally, a psychologist in Plymouth and a psychiatrist in Belfast tried to fix the broken man he had become; Gerry’s persistent reactivation of trauma was as bad as any observed throughout the conflict in the North of Ireland; he exhibited extraordinary recall, remembering the pattern of the policeman’s tie in the Surrey police station, the tic of the prosecutor’s face, the horror of his father’s last days. Every night was a torment.
Despite these struggles, this brave and endearing man made an enormous impact, travelling all over Australia to challenge injustices there, most emphatically those to the indigenous Australian population; he spoke at every prestigious university in the US about innocent prisoners; he proffered himself as the best evidence of why the death penalty should be abolished, he visited the family of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and campaigned for his release, berating Irish Americans for their instinctive failure to extend their support to a new suspect community, the Muslims, in the same way they had to him when he was wrongly detained. In his recovery he became a campaigner against various miscarriages of justice in the UK and around the world.
Gerry Conlon died of lung cancer aged 60 on June 21, 2014 in his Belfast home, surrounded by family members. His funeral was held at St Peter’s Cathedral, Belfast and was attended by other members of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, Irish Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore and Conlon’s former lawyer Gareth Peirce.
History and education
I was a wean when Gerry was falsely imprisoned and a woman by the time he got out. To read the true depths of this man’s suffering appals me and I can’t and won’t forget the words of Marie Eagles, the Under Secretary to Jack Straw, Minister of Justice, who cried when the Guilford Four were released: “You were not a miscarriage of justice, you were something else.” Quite simply put, they were made ‘scapegoats’ by the police, politicians and indeed the entire British legal system—all of whom including trial judge John Donaldson were promoted in some way throughout their careers. He was made a ‘Lord’ by Margaret Thatcher and later a Baron. Peter Imbert, the chief police investigator was promoted through the ranks to eventually become Commissioner of the Met by then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd.
This is why our history and the education of it is vital. These were real people and this is a very true story. Sadly, and it is why the immortal words of Seamus Heaney now ring in my ears: “There’s no such thing as an innocent bystander!”
L J Sexton, mum of four, returned to university to pursue her passion for the written word. She achieved her Honours Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing and hasn't stopped writing since. Lyn is born of Irish parents and lived in Donegal for eight years. She is also the press officer for Irish Minstrels CCÉ music group based in St Roch’s Secondary School
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