long after that the fun began. Conlon and Cashman stuck their heads out of the top of the limousine, started shouting and waving to pedestrians in the streets and guzzled down their bottles of Tequila as if tomorrow was for saints and suckers. There was a huge queue of limousines waiting to pull up outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
Cashman said: ‘We were off our heads before we even got there, and Jim was really embarrassed by it all. Just before we hit the red carpet, Jim managed to get Gerry down, and then he almost had to sit on him to keep him from going back up again!’
Mustering all the decorum at their disposal, Conlon and Cashman got out of the limousine. While Sheridan was being interviewed by the press, no one was paying Conlon any attention, so he went up to the podium where only the top stars are interviewed and introduced himself to a television producer. Soon after, with his Tequila-guzzling buddy standing alongside him, Conlon gave a very coherent interview, during which he endorsed the film.
The Oscars ceremony lasts for approximately four hours. Conlon and Cashman found the whole thing excruciatingly boring, so, after two hours, they retreated to the toilets for the remainder of the ceremony, where they wiled away the time smoking crack cocaine. Then, realising they were hungry, they left the building and searched the neighbourhood for a restaurant. The two made sure they were back in the Chandler Pavilion before the ceremony ended – just in time to join the first of the night’s parties: the Governors Ball. Cashman had fond memories of the event:
Afterwards, you just walk out the door and there was a party in the building, or connected to it. It was really big, and the public had no access. And there was loads of booze and champagne and all that. There was plenty of good stuff to eat there, you know, caviar, smoked salmon, grilled shrimps. I like that sorta stuff. So me and Gerry dug into that. Then we gatecrashed the different parties for the rest of the night, and we ended up back in our hotel and all these women stripped off and jumped into the pool. I stripped off and jumped in, and Gerry jumped in after me. We’d great craic. I’ll tell ya – it certainly beat going down to the local. Like, I can look back and if someone asks me, ‘Where were you at the weekend?’ I can say about that weekend: ‘I was at the Oscars.’ Know what I mean?
One
At 3.30 p.m. on 19 October 1989, in the homeland of Magna Carta and the cradle of parliamentary democracy, the underbelly of a Trojan horse opened and justice saw the light of day.
Confronted with indisputable evidence of police deception and perjury at the original trial in October–November 1975, appeal court judge Lord Lane had little option but to quash the convictions of the Guildford Four. These were individuals who had been found guilty of no-warning bombing attacks in Guildford, Surrey, and Woolwich, London, on 5 October and 7 November 1974, in which seven people died. It was a seminal and ugly moment in the history of British jurisprudence, but how did that Trojan horse ever get inside the hitherto impenetrable walls of the British judicial system in the first place? To answer that question, we must revert to the people who really did put the bombs in Guildford and Woolwich, and to Flat 7, Waldemar Avenue, Fulham.
By 1974, it was dawning on the seven-man IRA Army Council that the armed campaign to force the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland was stuttering. In fact, the British, far from being thrown back into the Irish sea, had weathered the best that the IRA could throw at them. Not only were the British still on the field of battle, they were planning new strategies to wipe out the IRA. Against a growing realisation that the war could not be won if it was limited to the borders of Northern Ireland, the Army Council sanctioned a no-warning bombing campaign against British army targets in London, Birmingham and other major cities in England.
The prospect of civilians being blown up, as well as British soldiers, was raised by the prominent Irish journalist Mary Holland when she interviewed Army Council member Dáithí Ó Conaill a week after The Kings Arms pub in Woolwich was attacked. Holland asked Ó Conaill about civilians being killed in the bombing campaign, and he chillingly replied: ‘They [the IRA] warned civilians not to frequent places where military personnel are known to have established haunts.’1 The upshot of that answer was that, if civilians got blown to smithereens, then so be it; it was their own fault, not the IRA’s. Ó Conaill then went on to say: ‘As regards military targets, there are no warnings. There will be no warnings.’ He then promised that the bombing campaign in England would be intensified.
Bombing England was hardly a novel tactic: in the middle of the nineteenth century and during World War II, republican activists had waged bombing campaigns in London and other British cities, but to little or no effect. On 8 March 1973, the very court in which the sentences against the Guildford Four had been delivered and eventually quashed – the Old Bailey – had been car-bombed by the IRA, and one innocent person, Frederick Milton, was killed. Undeterred by the lack of success, the Army Council unleashed an IRA Active Service Unit (ASU) in August 1974 in Fulham.
The officer commanding the ASU was a County Kerry man, Brendan Dowd, and the engineering officer was Joe O’Connell from County Clare. Another member of the IRA unit was Liam Quinn from San Francisco. At 5.30 p.m. on 21 September 1974, Dowd hired a Ford Escort car from Swan National car hire and signed a contract under the false name ‘Martin Moffitt’. That night, Dowd, O’Connell and an unidentified third man reconnoitred various pubs in Guildford for possible targets. Dowd and the third man did a second reconnoitre a week later, which confirmed in Dowd’s mind that the two pubs to be bombed should be The Horse and Groom and The Seven Stars.
At 2.30 p.m. on 4 October, Dowd again used the false name ‘Martin Moffitt’ to hire a white Hillman Avenger from Swan National. The next morning, he and O’Connell made the two six-pound bombs in the Fulham flat. That evening Dowd drove the white Avenger containing O’Connell, the third man and two young IRA women to Guildford, where Dowd parked on the top floor of a multistorey carpark. After priming the bombs in the car and placing them in each of the IRA women’s handbags, he then accompanied one of the females into The Horse and Groom, while O’Connell accompanied the other to The Seven Stars, along with the third man (who has never been charged with the bombings).
In The Horse and Groom, Dowd and his female compatriot pretended to be a courting couple, kissing and holding hands. The woman slipped the handbag containing the primed bomb under her seat. Meanwhile, O’Connell, the second female and the third man had found seats in the corner of the bar of The Seven Stars. The female left her handbag containing the bomb on the floor, and the third man gently pushed it under a bench with his feet. By 8.15 p.m., the five members of the bombing team were back in London and having a drink in The Durell Arms on Fulham Road.
The first bomb exploded in The Horse and Groom at 8.50 p.m. No warning was given. A reporter who was at the scene within a minute wrote: ‘People were running, shouting and screaming. Many of them were young girls and many were clutching bleeding heads. There was blood everywhere. The entire front of The Horse and Groom was blown out – there was rubble everywhere, glass, bricks, timber. People were scrabbling amongst the debris, trying to pull people out of the mess. It was panic and chaos.’2 Five people died in The Horse and Groom and some 200 were injured, many seriously. On hearing of the bomb attack on The Horse and Groom, Owen O’Brien, the manager of The Seven Stars, had the sharpness of mind to evacuate 200 customers from the pub, and when the bomb exploded, no one was killed.
On 10 October 1974, Harry Duggan from County Clare, Eddie Butler from County Limerick and Hugh Doherty from Donegal joined the ASU. In the month that followed the Guildford bombings, Dowd and his cell were unrelenting, carrying out four more bomb attacks, none of which had fatal consequences. Then, on 7 November 1974, in Sedding Street, close to London’s King’s Cross station, Joe O’Connell got into the passenger seat of a stolen white Corsair, with Dowd in the driving seat. Duggan and Butler sat in the back of the car. The men drove to the side of The Kings Arms pub in Woolwich, in south-east London, and, after making sure that it was packed with people, some of whom they presumed
