Five

‘On the grounds that the possibility of innocent contamination cannot be excluded, and on this basis alone, we think the convictions of all appellants are unsafe and unsatisfactory.’ With these words, the appeal court judges in London, on 26 June 1991, overturned the convictions of the Maguire Seven.

The narrowness on which the appeal was allowed made it a far from satisfactory verdict for those who had been falsely accused. The judgement ignited a firestorm of revulsion in Conlon, who was quick to unleash his wrath outside the court: ‘It’s an evil court; it is not a vehicle for dispensing justice.’ He went on to say that the court’s ruling was ‘a damage limitation exercise’ and ‘a political decision’, and that, ‘If they had dealt with any of the other grounds of appeal properly, it would be proven that the British judicial system murdered my father. That is what they are afraid of – that the whole world will know that British justice let an innocent and sick man die in prison.’ The vitriol was remorseless: ‘Those judges should have nightmares every night. They have given the most atrocious decision in this country. There is no British justice when it comes to Irish people. It’s like being a black man in South Africa. We, the Irish, are black South Africans when it comes to dealing with British courts, British police, and forensic scientists.’1

Annie Maguire was more subdued in her condemnation of the limited reprieve than Conlon had been, but she was no less disappointed: ‘I still hoped that British justice was going to be completed today. I suppose I was hoping for too much.’ With extraordinary humility, she further commented: ‘I have always said I wouldn’t let bitterness get hold of me. You only end up being a very sick person. Bitterness could be something like cancer and it spreads and spreads to every part. Giuseppe Conlon died in prison which he shouldn’t have done and I’m sure he’d agree with me – if some good comes, if others in the future are spared – we will accept that suffering as a gift from God, a cross to bear.’2

At the grave of Giuseppe Conlon, in Milltown cemetery, Belfast, Sarah Conlon reflected on the judgement and on her late husband’s death in prison. ‘His last wish has finally come true. Nobody lies when they are dying. Giuseppe knew he was an innocent man.’ After expressing delight that Annie Maguire and her family had been exonerated at last, Sarah mirrored Annie’s lack of bitterness: ‘If I were bitter, I couldn’t live with myself. I always trust and hope in God. But maybe those judges couldn’t admit they did a wrong thing – putting innocent people behind bars.’3

Given the scale of the horror that had been visited on Annie Maguire and Sarah Conlon, and their respective families, these two ladies’ faith in their religious beliefs and their lack of rancour is all the more remarkable.

The British Labour MP Chris Mullins said: ‘It’s an utterly incredible judgement and I can’t believe anybody of intelligence will believe a word of it. I’ve got used to stupidity on the part of senior figures in the legal establishment but this one takes the biscuit.’4

The Irish government said it was ‘deeply concerned’ by the judgement and that it was ‘imperative that consideration of this case should not end with the narrow grounds on which the appeal was allowed’.

At the end of a damning condemnation of the Maguire Seven appeal court verdict, Kevin McNamara, the shadow Northern Ireland Secretary of State, stated: ‘It is not possible to say if such miscarriages of justice will happen again.’ McNamara then asked ‘Who guards the guardians?’

Guarding his own historical legacy was something that had, and would continue, to tax Conlon’s mind for a considerable time.

By mid-1991, Conlon was becoming increasingly frustrated that the film about his life had not progressed as quickly he would have expected and, along with Joey Cashman, who had already worked on four feature films, he began trawling around film companies, looking for financial support.

Impatience, by its very definition, is irrational, and Conlon was suffocating on his own impatience. In his opinion, Gabriel Byrne, the man whom he believed held out so much promise, had delivered so little. But was this fair? The starting point for all films is an idea, which can be a true-to-life experience or a piece of fiction. After that, someone needs to write a script. Byrne had set that process in motion when he approached Belfast-born screenwriter Terry George in the Sin-é bar in Manhattan’s East Village (the same bar where Gerry and Gabriel had first liaised with each other in 1990) and asked him if he would write a screenplay about Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four, based on Proved Innocent. George had agreed. Byrne had also contacted the Irish director Jim Sheridan to direct the film. So the wheels were turning; the process was underway. Had Conlon expected too much, too soon? It usually takes anything from three to five years for a film to be made, and that is more often than not after a script goes into development. In Conlon’s amateurish estimation, Byrne had been inattentive; he had missed a penalty kick. Byrne was certainly busy: he was preparing to produce and star in an Irish film called Into the West, and at the same time, he was getting ready to act in Cool World, along with Brad Pitt and Kim Basinger.

The question inevitably arises: what value could be placed on the one dollar gentleman’s agreement between Conlon and Byrne in light of the former’s disillusionment with the latter? The short answer is very little. It was still, at that stage, Conlon’s project and he was in no mood for what he saw as dithering on Byrne’s part.

Perhaps out of loyalty to Gabriel Byrne, Conlon had been initially reluctant to talk to Jim Sheridan about producing the movie. Yet the two men genuinely liked each other. It is hardly surprising that each man was taken with the other: they were both supercharged characters with immense energy and drive, and they were both natural communicators. Moreover, Sheridan had more than demonstrated that he had the ability to light up the silver screen with the Guildford Four man’s story.

Although a relative newcomer to the film-making business, Sheridan, known to his friends as ‘Shay’, had directed the financially successful My Left Foot, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, in 1989. That film was made for £600,000 but grossed over £14 million at the box office. My Left Foot also received five Academy nominations, including best director for Sheridan, with actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker receiving Oscars for best male actor and best female supporting actor respectively. Then, in 1990, Sheridan directed the big screen adaptation of Irish playwright John B. Keane’s The Field, starring Richard Harris, who received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role. But while the film was artfully produced and directed, it had limited appeal and was a box office flop.

During meetings with Sheridan in London and Dublin, Conlon and Cashman listened attentively to his proposals. They were surprised to hear Sheridan express views that were very close to their own. They nodded to each other as Sheridan laid out his vision of The Conlon Story, the film’s working title. Of particular interest to Conlon and Cashman was the fact that Sheridan said Daniel Day-Lewis was interested in working on the film, but would not act in it. Film studios like star power and Day-Lewis had it to spare. The potential involvement of Day-Lewis, the son of the Anglo-Irish poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, helped in no small way to convince Conlon that Sheridan was the right man for the job. But for the movie to reach its full potential, Day-Lewis had to be persuaded to take on the role of Gerry Conlon.

Now that Conlon had secured Sheridan’s pledge to co-produce and direct the film, there was the unenviable task of telling Gabriel Byrne that Sheridan had stepped into his shoes and had taken overall charge of making the film. Joey Cashman recalled travelling to Los Angeles in the spring of 1991 with Conlon to meet Byrne:

So me and Gerry are in this girl’s house. Her old man is the owner of Mitsubishi, the Japanese electronic and car company. But she has no money. That wasn’t a problem. On our last day over there, Gabriel turned up and he and Gerry took a walk down by the swimming pool, which, I may add, was full of slime. I don’t know what was said between the two of them, and Gerry didn’t say much afterwards, but it seemed to me that Jim was in the driving seat in regards to the movie, although Gerry did say Gabriel was still very much involved.5

The deep breath had been taken. Conlon undoubtedly would have preferred to be in the driving seat himself, but pragmatism and inexperience dictated that he give way to others. Still, that did not mean he was going to walk away from what he saw as his film. To do that would have stripped his life of discipline and purpose, which his life had to have. This reluctance to let go was not missed by those who knew Conlon in 1991: ‘Getting the film made was very important to Gerry,’ Ann McKernan said. ‘It wasn’t about money for him; it was about getting the truth out. And it was about keeping busy, as well. He needed to be doing something, something positive.’6

Conlon’s psychotherapist Barry Walle explained this alternative raison d’être as ‘displacement activity’ and said:

Without a strong reason to keep going, he would go into meltdown, and getting his film made was highly motivational. But any appearance of personal organisation was really accidental, or limited: where would he have learnt it? A lot of arrangements for travel were made by, or with the help of others. He was quite clever at covering up this difficulty, a bit like illiterate people, only he was far from illiterate. A major fear was appearing stupid, so he didn’t like asking questions of strangers to navigate around places or organisations in case people thought him a numbskull, and again, he was far from a numbskull. He attributed other people with knowing how to do these things, and it was only people like him that didn’t. He remembered the travel as a good time, an adventure, his purpose in trying to sell the film – an enabler perhaps. He certainly met a lot of interesting people he wouldn’t otherwise have met. There may have been ‘control’ reasons wrapped in there, in that, having only loose control of his life, he didn’t want to lose control of his story.7

Walle summed up succinctly part of the damage that fifteen years of wrongful incarceration had done to Gerry Conlon. Crucially, in the two years since walking free from the Old Bailey, he had received no treatment for the psychological malaise that was afflicting him and, given that his deep mental trauma was never going to magically cure itself, what emerges from Walle’s analysis is that, despite his outwardly confident persona, Gerry Conlon was holding on to his sanity by his fingertips.

Despite all the body blows that life had dealt him, Conlon remained an idealist. Unfortunately, idealists are not always the best judges of human nature simply because they always tend to think the best of people. He had convinced himself that he could persuade the patriarchs of the film-making business of the merits of his real-life story, yet it appears that he had little or no grasp of the fact that wholesome stories of survival against great odds do not always translate into commercially profitable films. In the same vein, it does not seem to have crossed his mind that his story might need a hefty shot of artistic licence in order to attract investors before it could be turned into a successful production.

Conlon and Cashman were not without contacts: ‘I met with a guy called John Patek from the William Morris Agency, who offered me an outrageous amount of money for the option, but I wanted somebody who would understand the situation. I didn’t want John Wayne coming in and releasing people. I wanted the story to be told. I wanted people to understand it – when terrorism happens, when bombs go off, when innocent people are killed, that the reaction of the press and the police is to, “Get someone. Get anyone.”’8

Cashman remembers the two visionaries setting off, ‘with undying optimism to Ireland, the USA, and, of course, the UK. We met producers, including the president of Warner Brothers Films, who helped us but said the movie wasn’t for them, directors, actors, agents, lawyers, accountants – and a lot of bullshitters,’ Cashman recalls. ‘One of the first things we learned was that Hollywood film companies might buy one hundred scripts but only turn ten or so into films. All the others sit on shelves in the company’s storerooms. If they hear that a rival company is interested in a script, they will buy it just to stop the competition from making the movie.’ Cashman explains that this resulted in their first decision: ‘We would deal only with a company that signed a legal document to make the film.’9

Finola Geraghty remembered: ‘Gerry went through an awful time with his film. He said he got through fifteen years in category “A” prisons intact, and it was dealing with the movie business people that gave him a nervous breakdown.’10

Throughout 1991, Terry George struggled manfully to avoid a nervous breakdown. He had to put together a script, but it was essential to get to the essence of Gerry Conlon, and that was never going to be easy because there were several Gerry Conlons, as Terry recalled:

The book Proved Innocent was very anecdotal. Gerry had a phenomenal memory and his sense of Belfast folklore and his outrage came across. But I didn’t have the structure I needed for a film. I had the sense that some stuff was too painful for Gerry to talk about. Because he’s such a whirlwind and wants to get out, and party, and drink, it was hard to sit him down in one place at one time. I got exasperated and put him into a car, and we drove down from New York to Key West. That’s a three-day drive, and I taped everything he said on the way down. I put him in a little moving cell, and the price for sitting still was two days’ fishing in Key West. I was then able to get the father-son relationship.

Terry did not get the father-son relationship and, if indeed he did, it was not reflected in the film. When asked about the extensive use of dramatic licence in the film, Terry George was unapologetic: ‘Inevitably, you are going to compress and manipulate and stretch and invent – at least to some degree – to make the story work as cinema.’11

For his part, Sheridan saw the father-son relationship, rather than the scale of the injustice perpetrated on the Conlons, as the dramatic thrust of the film: ‘I wanted to tell the father’s story most of all. I didn’t really want to do the story of all the injustice. I knew the central father-son story could be universal.’12 It may be that Jim Sheridan, producer, director and businessman, had a wary eye fixed on the reaction of the press when he expressed this sentiment before the première of In the Name of the Father in Dublin on 27 December 1993, almost six weeks before the film was released in Britain. Perhaps he anticipated that the film would be slated by the British press as being pro-IRA, hence this playing loose with the miscarriage of justice element in the film. It may be that he really did believe the father-son relationship was the core theme of the film; he said as much in a press interview in 1999: ‘I was accused of lying in In the Name of the Father, but the real lie was saying that the film was about the Guildford Four when really it was about a non-violent parent.’13 Whatever it may be, the fact remains that if the Conlons had not been victims of a miscarriage of injustice, they would not have been in prison, and there would have been no father-son relationship theme to explore: one could not have existed without the other. Having turned down ‘an outrageous amount of money’ from the William Morris Agency because he did not think their views about the film reflected his experiences, it is challenging to see why Gerry Conlon would have involved Jim Sheridan in the making of a film about his life if he had known that Sheridan viewed the injustice perpetrated against Giuseppe and himself as being of secondary importance.

While the tumult surrounding his film was playing out, Gerry plunged into a serious relationship with a young lady he nicknamed ‘Minty’, a striking 20-year-old English camera assistant, whom he met on a film set in 1991. Although there was a seventeen-year age gap between the two, in terms of psychological development it was much less than that because prison seldom affords inmates opportunities to mature, and Conlon, like so many ex-prisoners, had not really left his pre-arrest emotional base camp. Coupled with this, the dietary and social constraints of prison life ensured that he had kept his Peter Pan looks. For her part, Minty found Gerry intoxicating:

He had the ability to make every single person feel incredibly special, like they were his confidant. Even in places with hundreds of people in it, he’d find you in a darkened corner of a club or wherever you were, indeed, whoever you were, and he’d huddle up close, look you deep in your eyes – pin you with his eyes – and start talking, weaving the magic web he had with words around you, sharing his emotions, his turmoil, whilst still making you laugh. He was magic, a gifted orator. No one was immune (most especially women), no one was ignored. Children grew four inches with pride (and attention) in his presence. It was like he walked around sprinkling feel-good fairy dust on people – whether they were highfalutin politicians, movie stars or naive little girls in over their heads like me. In a world of glitz and glamour, lots of drugs and mostly all bollocks, Gerry made it real and made you feel special, which I think is all anyone wants at the end of the day. He understood that very well and used it. All anyone wanted to do in response was make him feel good, and we all tried very hard. Gerry was deeply loved by all our gang. His attention and focus was real. No matter who you were on the surface, he saw the person below.14

By January 1992, Minty and Gerry were living together in his Tufnell Park flat. Minty had a calming influence on Gerry and this pacifying effect was noticed by Siobhan MacGowan, Marion McKeone, Finola Geraghty and other members of the gang: the artistic friends with whom Gerry shared his deepest thoughts and trepidations. At the start of their romance, Minty found Gerry a delight to be around:

Being on the receiving end of Gerry’s ‘romantic’ love was mind-blowing and intense. Imagine being that kind of focus for someone like him, at twenty years old. It was ferocious and passionate. I’ve never felt so cherished or precious. There was never any question as to how he felt at that point. It was in the tension of his arms when they snaked out and grabbed you and reeled you in as you walked past, in the burning of his stare across a room, or how he’d throw you over his shoulder and stalk off, not a care who saw him or what they said – in the way he hung on to you whilst he slept.15

Yet, no matter how blissful this relationship was in the beginning, its survival was always going to be a test of stamina, given the severity of the dislocation that Conlon was experiencing. For a start, he was driven by an overpowering emotional need to be unrestricted: after his imprisonment, boundaries of any sort were anathema to him. Accordingly, he was out of the home quite often – sometimes without Minty – travelling abroad, trying to sell his story to film producers and touring with The Pogues. This freewheeling pattern was hardly conducive to a lasting relationship. Then there was his old-fashioned idea of what constituted a loving union.

Born in a staunchly Catholic area of Belfast in 1954, Conlon had grown up in a society where, in many families, the man of the house ruled the household like a miniature feudal chieftain and where the wife’s primary purposes were to accommodate her husband, rear their children and keep a tidy home. Conlon’s stretch in prison had not dented this anachronistic outlook, but Minty came from a different age and perspective. On 17 March 1992, she recorded in her diary: ‘Got home from work today. Gerry thinks it’s all basically down to me thinking the cleaning and cooking is below me and that if he’s paying the house bills, I should do all that without thinking and any other woman would do it and be grateful. He says I need to see a shrink more that he does and he is more honest than I.’16

What was emerging was a schism brought about by Gerry’s adverse circumstances and the couples’ age disparity. Gerry wanted a stay-at-home, do-as-you’re-told partner while Minty wanted much more:

He expected me to keep house and iron his shirts, furnish the house, and stay in it and wait for him. I’d been galloping full-tilt like a bolted horse since I left home at fifteen, and I was fresh off the plane from living in the United States on my own. I was looking for a partner in crime to embark on adventures and realise ambitions with. Gerry wanted me at home where he could control me. He used to bring up marriage and kids all the time, but I am sure it was only another method of control.17

Something else that put a chokehold on the relationship was Conlon’s need to be surrounded by people – it did not matter who. While he undoubtedly liked the idea of keeping the party going – irrespective of cost – fear played a significant role in his choice of friends. Put bluntly, the man was terrified that ‘someone’ would murder him – and with good reason. Shortly after meeting Minty, he was walking close to the tube station in Chalk Farm, an area of north-east London, when he was confronted by a gang of skinheads, one of whom shouted: ‘Look! That’s Gerry Conlon! Get him!’ Conlon took off running as fast as he could, with the skinheads in full pursuit. The skinheads followed him all the way to Camden Town and part of the way back to Kentish Town. After taking quite a while to recover in his Tufnell Park flat, Conlon told friends that during the chase all he could think of was, ‘My shoelaces will come undone. Oh, God, don’t let them come undone, don’t let them come undone.’ Later he was accosted by a man wielding a machete who chased him for his life through Camden and who was shouting that he was going to chop off his head. So who could blame Conlon for seeking the protection of tough guys, close friends from his years in prison who would offer him some form of protection? But everything has its price. The tariff that Conlon paid for this shield was significant. His friends from the creative arts were spooked by his latest choice of companions. ‘The gang were all professionals and they had full lives,’ Minty said. ‘When we were with them, it felt good. No one was there because of who the other was, but purely for the pleasure of each other’s company. Real friends.’ Minty explained how this changed when he started clubbing: ‘The calibre of the people around him dropped significantly – lots of hangers-on only there because of who he was and what he could give them. Dishonest people. He’d bring them back to our home at the end of the night to carry on. I went down to 90lb in weight and started sharing his panic attacks with him!’18

While she may have shared his panic attacks, Minty nevertheless did not go Dutch with Gerry’s frantic rush to get his film produced. On 28 April 1992, Minty prophetically wrote in her diary: ‘I wonder if doing this film with Sheridan will help you resolve some of those feelings, Gerry? I think you’re going into battle unprepared.’19 When asked in 2016 what she meant by this, Minty said, ‘He still hadn’t come to terms with everything. It [his arrest, conviction and prison experience] was still as raw as it must have been when it happened. I always felt he’d paused his life while inside and then didn’t know how to un-pause it when he got out.’20

On 29 May 1992, Minty wrote, ‘Gerry’s going to have such a shock when they make this film.’21 She explained this insightful entry in 2016:

When your life is being interpreted by people who weren’t there and who are glamorising it – when the world is looking at it, dissecting it – he wasn’t ready for it. It was too close and too painful, and film-makers cheapen it in a way. It’s their livelihood. It’s not yours anymore – they take it and own it. I think that’s what I was talking about. He didn’t realise. Mostly he didn’t realise he wasn’t ready. He refused to even look at how raw it still was. It was as though it had only happened yesterday. It chokes my throat just writing this and remembering how much pain he was in on a daily basis. How can you hand that over to Hollywood and be okay? As lovely as everyone was who worked on it, in the end they were still ‘in the movies’.22

The friction between the two was becoming unbearable and in a last-ditch attempt to mend their fractured romance, Gerry persuaded Minty to go on a private holiday with him. Everything was on course. Then, a week before they were due to leave, Gerry received a telephone call from ‘Carl’ to say he had just been released from prison after serving an eighteen-year sentence for grievous bodily harm. His release put Gerry in a predicament because Carl had been a true friend from prison, so close, in fact, that he had often written to Gerry’s mother while he had been incarcerated. Now that he was out, Carl had no means of supporting himself and nowhere to stay: a not uncommon phenomenon for ex-prisoners. Minty said that Gerry wanted to take care of his friend and felt obliged to bring him with them on holiday. In truth, Carl did not have to go with them: Conlon had enough money to put him up in a hotel, on full board, until he and Minty came back, after which he could have helped Carl, but that option was not taken up.

Predictably, the tension was exacerbated when Conlon allowed Carl to live in the Tufnell Park flat after coming back from the holiday. While the former prisoners were genuine friends, this was above and beyond the call of duty, especially given the delicate state of Conlon’s relationship with Minty. Predictably, Carl became Conlon’s minder. ‘I used to try to persuade Gerry to travel to remote places with me, to show him a world far away from politics and anything he knew,’ Minty said. She thought it would give him a rest and some peace and was convinced it would heal him. She also used to argue that she wanted to do more with her life than clubbing and taking drugs. On many occasions, his response was that his needs came first. ‘Within a year of breaking up with him, I was living in a tiger research station in Nepal, taking stills, and had regained my health and sanity, whilst he was still partying and doing the same thing. He should have come with me,’ she added.

When the break-up came in the autumn of 1992, there was no long-drawn-out quarrel, no finger-pointing, just sadness: ‘I got a job away which I knew would give me the strength to finally leave him for good,’ Minty said. ‘I will never forget his face when I went. I picked up my bags at the front door and looked back at him, and he said: “You aren’t coming back, are you?” and there was such sadness and resignation etched there. That was when we acknowledged that it was over.’

Despite the break-up, Minty and Gerry met each other regularly. On 11 January 1993, Minty recorded: ‘Gerry started to talk about marriage and babies again.’23 When asked how often Gerry had proposed to her, Minty said, ‘He did it a lot. Makes me choke again thinking of it. But mainly I can remember him with his forehead on mine telling me how much he loved me and “I want to marry you and have babies with you.”’24

Five years later, speaking of the possibility that he might eventually get married and have a family of his own, Conlon said:

It’s now getting to the stage where I’m gradually accepting these things are never going to happen to me. There were two women in my life, one was a journalist and the other was a camera assistant. Two beautiful women and I know my mother wanted me to settle down with either of them, but – and it wasn’t because I didn’t have feelings for them – it’s just that the feelings didn’t feel like love. Although I was extremely fond of them and the relationships were working and I think once they started to work I started to want it not to work and that, I think, is one of the symptoms of long-term imprisonment.25

That he started ‘to want it not to work’ is the self-denial of happiness, the rejection of deliverance from misery. If this is accurate, Conlon was once again flogging himself, declaring himself a sinner, and proclaiming that he was unworthy of God’s forgiveness or a woman’s love. A more discriminatory view could be that, as Minty pointed out, Conlon’s needs came first. It is noticeable that in this and future interviews Conlon never named the women with whom he had had intimate relationships.

In 1992, Dr Adrian Grounds of Cambridge University carried out psychiatric assessments on eighteen men (including Conlon) who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced in British courts. In his 1996 report, Grounds compared the mental state of miscarriage of justice victims to that of ‘brain-damaged accident victims, or people who had suffered war crimes.’ Grounds added that, ‘It often made them impossible to live with.’26 Was Conlon impossible to live with? He told Siobhan MacGowan as much: ‘He said afterwards he couldn’t be with anyone. He couldn’t commit; he wasn’t able. He had too much going on, too much un-worked-out stuff.’27

While Conlon had a talent for retaining friendships with most of his former lovers, he had little or no talent for staying in relationships. Marion McKeone observed: ‘When his relationship with Minty ended, he was heartbroken. He really felt it, and it seemed to launch him into a downward spiral of drink and drugs. But he didn’t want to get help. I think he was terrified of what would happen if he tried to deal with the pain and the guilt of what happened to his father. So he ran away.’28

Forlorn, out of control, fleeing from help, Gerry Conlon was at large in a world of trouble.