Gerry Conlon: ‘It could’ve happened to anyone’
“It could’ve happened to anyone, nothing special about me.” That’s what sticks in my head most of all from Gerry Conlon, who died in Belfast on 21 June after a short but intense fight with cancer – and a long and intense fight with the British justice system after he was framed, then imprisoned for more than a decade, by the British state.
It could have been anyone. Gerry was a 20-year-old knock-about who wasn’t really into politics – aside from the day-to-day politics of growing up in the Falls Road area of West Belfast in the 1970s. He had been a member of Fianna Éireann (a youth organisation associated with the IRA), but was thrown out because of his predilection for petty crime. He moved to London “to get away from all that shit” and hung out getting stoned with the hippie crowd.
In 1974, while visiting family in Belfast, Gerry was dragged out of his bed by soldiers and taken by military plane to England, where he was tortured: “And I mean tortured. To be held naked. To have Alsatian dogs set upon you. To be taken naked to country lanes, hooded, handcuffed. To have the hood taken off and told to open your mouth. And when I shook my head, they hit me in the head with a revolver. And when I went ‘Oh’, they stuck the gun in my mouth, put the hammer back and pulled the trigger. This is what they did. This is what they were allowed to do.”
After being told by police that they would kill his mother, he confessed to taking part in the bombings of two pubs in Guildford near London, which were popular with British servicemen from the nearby Pirbright Barracks. Four soldiers and one civilian were killed in these explosions. Sixty-five people were injured. Along with Paul Hill, Carole Richardson and Paddy Armstrong, known as the Guildford Four, he spent the next 15 years inside.
Later in 1974, his father Giuseppe was also arrested, along with others who became known as the Maguire Seven, on fabricated charges of handling the explosives used by the Guildford Four. Sentenced to 12 years, prison life played havoc with his existing lung condition; he served only six before dying inside at age 58.
Baron Donaldson of Lymington, the judge who presided over both trials, expressed disappointment that the Guildford Four had not been charged with treason – a charge that allowed for the death penalty. The same disappointment was aired by Baron Bridge of Harwich, who presided over the trial of the similarly fitted-up Birmingham Six.
In 1989 the Guildford Four were granted an appeal after paperwork from the original trial was found to have been heavily edited. Presiding over the appeal, Chief Justice Lord Lane found that the police notes were “fabrication by the police from start to finish, invented by some fertile constabulary mind” or a “contemporaneous manuscript note … reduced into typewritten form [and] then amended here and there in order to improve it; and, finally … reconverted into manuscript by the various Surrey officers involved so that it could be produced as a contemporaneous note”.
It took until 2005 – 16 years after the charges were quashed – for the British government to apologise to the families of those imprisoned. No police officer, government official or judge was convicted of any wrongdoing in the cases of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven or the Birmingham Six (who were exonerated in 1991).
After his release from prison, Gerry suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and drug and alcohol problems. But he kept fighting. He and Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six were members of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation and worked ceaselessly towards uncovering the many crimes of the British justice system.
At an event supporting Chelsea Manning in Dublin last year, he pointed out that one of the most insidious sides to the whole saga was that in 1994, after a royal commission into the Birmingham Six trial, British director of public prosecutions Barbara Mills put a 75-year public immunity interest order on the case – the only criminal cases in British history to receive this. This was, in Gerry’s words, “to protect the people who made their names on it”.
Gerry went on to name names, however. And they should be named here: “Michael Havers, the prosecutor who prosecuted us, who withheld evidence … Thatcher made him attorney general and then lord chancellor; Peter Imbert, the policeman who was the negotiator … he was a run-of-the-mill detective sergeant, he organised the perjury and they made him head of the Metropolitan Police, Thatcher knighted him and Blair made him a lord; and Donaldson, the judge who tried me and then three months later tried my father and as soon as the jury was sworn in said to the jury, ‘You’re going to hear the name Conlon through this trial, because that man over there is Giuseppe Conlon, the father of the Guildford pub bomber who I sentenced to life plus 30 years three months ago’.”
“This was not a miscarriage of justice; this was something else,” said Gerry. “This was deliberate policy of the British government.” When he and Paddy Armstrong were in Australia a few years ago, he said: “It’s still happening now.” The IRA campaigns of the mid-’70s were used as a pretext to launch a “war on terror” in much the same way the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks were used more recently.
Today such policy continues in the prosecution of people, such as the Barwon 13 in Melbourne, for thought crimes, in the abomination of Guantánamo Bay and in the targeting of whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
It is a push to instil fear and terror into those of us fighting the system – and it needs to be fought. As Gerry said, “It could’ve been anyone.”
