on 2 December 1989, Conlon said that he had met Cardinal O’Connor on the previous two Sundays, and he found him to be ‘very honest, sincere and aware’.
For the remainder of his life, Gerry Conlon straddled two continents. He had a great affection for the United States, and over the years would become a regular visitor to that country. But he liked coming home, whether that home was in Belfast or London. At the end of November 1989, he returned to Ireland just in time to appear on RTÉ’s prime television talk show, The Late, Late Show, along with Paul Hill. Earlier, the Irish Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey, had met both men and had given them his credit card on the understanding that they should use it to fit themselves out with new clothes. It was an offer neither man could refuse, and when they appeared alongside the show’s host, Gay Byrne, they were suitably attired in designer suits. When Byrne asked Conlon what he would like to do now, he replied that he would like to go to the World Cup football finals in Italy the following summer. A travel agent, watching the interview, wrote to Conlon offering him and Hill a free trip to Italy. Conlon immediately took up the offer.
In that same month, Conlon was given a £50,000 interim compensation payment from the British government. It would be the first tranche of £546,000 that he would eventually receive. Conlon was unimpressed: ‘They gave me £546,000 for taking me, torturing and framing me, taking my father, torturing him and having him in prison; then leaving me sinking in the quicksand of my own nightmares.’ He went on to say that, ‘Giving money to victims of miscarriages of justice is like giving them a bottle of whiskey and a revolver. You may as well say, “Here’s the money, now go and kill yourself.”’12 Conlon did not go and kill himself, but he thought about committing suicide many times as he struggled to readjust to a normal life. It could be argued that, when he moved away from Belfast and his family home in 1974, Conlon lost all sight of what a normal life looked like. He had lived in squats and hostels, had been unable to hold down a job and had begun experimenting with drugs.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of 9 December 1989, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong, and relatives of the Birmingham Six led the ‘Parade of Innocence’ through central Dublin to celebrate the release of the Guildford Four and to highlight the continued incarceration of the Birmingham Six. As dusk fell, 10,000 people lit candles and walked behind them. Around 200 costumed actors, some on floats, played the parts of prisoners, judges, policemen and torch-bearers. When the parade reached the River Liffey, a boat made of tabloid newspapers from the 1975 media campaign against the Guildford Four, Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six was ceremoniously burned. Three hours after the parade had begun, the last of the marchers reached the Central Bank plaza where they were treated to passionate speeches from Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill and the former MP for Mid-Ulster, Bernadette McAliskey, amongst others.
At the end of the pageant, the manager of The Pogues, Frank Murray, introduced himself to the ex-prisoners and brought them around to Blooms Hotel in Temple Bar. After a few drinks, arrangements were made to meet up later. Several hours after that, Murray was in a bar and restaurant called ‘Suesey Street’ in Leeson Street.
You could drink fairly easy there. You could definitely get wine and champagne after hours, and every so often the police would come in, but we knew they were coming in so the wine bottles and the drink would disappear off the tables for ten minutes until the police went away. Well, I heard this commotion outside the door, you see, so I went to have a look out and saw the security men and Gerry, and sharp enough, he recognised me immediately and shouted over, ‘Frank! Frank, it’s me.’ Once I told the security men who they were, they were let in. So we went to the bar and we were having a drink for about five minutes and word got around and all of a sudden Gerry was swarming with women and they were saying hello to him, and Gerry, naturally enough, was in like Flynn. That was Gerry; he had a glint in his eye, a beautiful mischievous glint that the women loved.13
On his release from prison, Conlon wanted to live in Belfast with his family, but Belfast is a relatively small city, made even smaller by the sectarian divide that dissects it. One of the consequences of this tribal divide at the time of Conlon’s release in 1989 was the omnipresence of loyalist assassins, who opted to believe the hints emanating from certain British newspapers that Conlon had been guilty and had been released only by dint of a judicial faux pas. In light of this, loyalist paramilitaries would have viewed him as a particularly desirable target. Moreover, the Conlon household was situated in the strongly republican Lower Falls, a district where the IRA and the British army frequently fought each other in gun battles. Gerry never hid the fact that he had inherited his father’s pacifist views, and his forthright rejection of war and political violence was interpreted by some within his own community as somehow being anti-IRA. He was anti-IRA, but he was also anti-British army and anti-loyalist paramilitaries. Given the myopia and cataclysmic social upheaval that had infected Belfast and its citizens for over two decades at that time, it was hardly surprising that Conlon opted to get away from it all and live in cosmopolitan London.
He liked London and found the English generally endearing: ‘There is not a lot of bitterness in my heart. I feel bitter towards the judiciary, towards the police who framed me, who fabricated evidence, but I have nothing but time and respect for all the English people who helped, and there have been so, so many of them.’14 Later he would say, ‘English people are brilliant people.’15And so it was that Gerry moved into the detached Victorian house of Gareth Peirce and her husband, Bill, in London’s Kentish Town in December 1989. This was one of his better decisions because Peirce provided a degree of stability and good judgement that he badly needed. She understood him and had a feel for the mountains that all the miscarriage of justice victims would have to climb if they were ever to readjust back into society: ‘They [the Guildford Four] came out with no money and no counselling,’ she said. ‘They had no references. It’s difficult to open a bank account; you can’t get a mortgage. They have no GP. They don’t belong.’16
Gerry Conlon never professed to be a saint nor, in numerous subsequent press interviews, did he hide his failings and transgressions. Speaking bluntly of the time before he was arrested for the Guildford bombings, he said: ‘We [Paul Hill and he] were working on building sites. We were getting drunk; we were known to the community [a euphemism for being petty criminals]. We were fucking arseholes.’17 But that was then. Now he wanted a new beginning. He wanted to travel and to savour humanity in all its majesty. He was still only thirty-five years old, and he wanted to catch up with a life that had zipped passed him fifteen years earlier. Perhaps he saw Gareth Peirce as a bridgehead of sensibility, a sobering influence who, to some extent, cramped his style, but by the start of 1990 he was looking for his own accommodation.
Jeremy Corbyn, the future British Labour Party leader and the MP for Islington North, had highlighted the case of the Guildford Four, and he secured Conlon a small one-bedroom council flat in the Holloway Road area of north London. After buying a sofa-bed, Martin Loughran moved in with Gerry. It was a claustrophobic existence, far removed from the home comforts of Gareth and Bill’s house, but crucially, the name Conlon was on the rent book. Before long, further compensation began to filter through, and Gerry was able to buy a two-bedroom basement flat in Tufnell Park, north London. Now he was, for the first time in fifteen years, the architect and builder of his own world.
‘When we moved into Tufnell Park, I went back to my work on the building sites,’ Martin Loughran says. ‘Gerry was a whirlwind. He was still very active on the Birmingham Six front – I remember he went to a big conference in Copenhagen – but he was also meeting people and partying. Y’see, Gerry made friends easily. And he was a party-animal. I didn’t like parties; I preferred a quiet pint in my local pub.’ Loughran has no recollection of Conlon taking any drugs other than marijuana:
I would say his biggest vice in those days was his gambling. He had no appreciation of money. He just saw money as a means to get him where he wanted to go and then just rake it up. I saw me sitting in the flat in Tufnell Park and there was a bookies way down the street, and he’d say to me, ‘There’s a grand. Away and put it on such and such a horse.’ And maybe it was beat. Broke my heart, like. But, then again, I’ve seen
