Then, at around five o’clock in the morning, Gerry took a panic attack. He went to his mother’s room and explained to her how miserable he was feeling. He wept. At this point, his Uncle Hughie brought him back to his flat in Westbourne Terrace Road.
At breakfast in the hotel the next morning, Ann McKernan asked Hughie what had happened to Gerry, and Hughie said: ‘I gave him my leather jacket and we went for a walk in the rain.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘And then Gerry said to me, “Isn’t this brilliant? I haven’t walked in the rain for fifteen years.”’
Hughie went on to tell Ann that Gerry later phoned his solicitor and friend Gareth Peirce to come and collect him. Gerry was discovering that there was a lot more to freedom than simply not being locked up: he had got out of jail, but jail had not got out of him.
On 31 December 1974, Gerry Conlon was flown from Belfast to England on a draughty RAF transport plane. Handcuffed to a hostile detective, he was bewildered at the enormity of the charges being levelled against him, and he was terrified. Perhaps his teeth were chattering; perhaps he was shivering. For sure, he had no idea of the hardships and tribulations that lay ahead. On 21 October 1989, he returned to Belfast with no hostile detective. He was not handcuffed, and he was not on board a chilly RAF transport plane. Instead, he was on a plush private jet with his sister Ann, Diana St James and friends, courtesy of ITN. During the flight, he helped himself to smoked salmon and champagne. Gerry Conlon probably thought he was free at last. He wasn’t.
Two
‘I hope your arse is well greased, Hill.’
‘It’s buttered-up like a big Belfast bap, Conlon.’
‘It’d better be ’cause I’ve a wee parcel here to keep you entertained in them there dark nights.’1
As he casts his agile memory back to his visit with Gerry Conlon in Gartree Prison on 28 October 1989, Paddy Hill lifts a rolled-up cigarette from the glass dining table and lights up. He inhales deeply and exhales slowly. How did Gerry smuggle in the hash and the tobacco? ‘Between his bum cheeks,’ Hill answers matter-of-factly. And how did the transfer take place? ‘Gerry looked around to see if any screws were watching and, when he saw there wasn’t, he shoved his hand down the back of his trousers and when it came back up again, there was a cylindrical parcel wrapped in cling-paper in it.’ Hill takes another draw on his cigarette. ‘The next thing, he casually reached over the table to me, as if shaking my hand, and passed me the parcel. I bangled [secreted in rectum] it immediately. “There’s two ounces of snout and two ounces of hash in there”, he said. Believe me; that brought a smile to my face.’
It still brings a smile to his face. Hill casually relights his cigarette. It does not seem to have crossed his mind that, just over a week after Gerry had thundered out of the Old Bailey, declaring to the world that he had spent fifteen years in prison for something he did not do, and after being on the front page of practically every newspaper in the western hemisphere, Gerry Conlon had risked being returned to prison for smuggling two ounces of hash into prison.
‘Nah, that wouldn’t have happened. Y’see, we knew all the moves.’2
But in the jungle of everyday life, outside of prison, Gerry barely knew any moves, and in the years after his release, he would return to a recurring theme: ‘There are days when I wish I was still in prison.’
It is not hard to see why there was a brotherly bond between Conlon and Hill: they were both intelligent, had the same lively nature and were fighters at heart. In an interview with The Irish News on 23 October 1989, Conlon said:
You wouldn’t believe how emotionally attached I am to Paddy Hill. He uses thirty quid a week on stamps to write to people to highlight his case – he doesn’t stop working and every letter he wrote mentioned the Guildford Four and every letter I wrote mentioned the Birmingham Six. So I couldn’t live with myself if I did nothing about the Birmingham Six, because I know if Paddy Hill were sitting here now talking to you, Paddy Hill’s thoughts would be with me as my thoughts are with him.3
Other people’s thoughts were with Gerry Conlon and some of them were not that friendly. Seán Smyth, who, as one of the Maguire Seven, had been sentenced to eleven years in prison, could never be accused of couching his criticism of Conlon in soft terms:
The person I blame to the day I die for those lost years is Gerry Conlon. He had no call to do that. He should have kept his mouth shut. We all did. I got beatings, threats, psychological torture – the lot, but I never once admitted anything or implicated anyone. I remember watching Gerard Conlon on television when he got out of the Old Bailey. Okay, so he was innocent. He didn’t deserve to be in prison but if it wasn’t for him we would never have been in prison either. Any of us. He is running around like Jack-the-Lad. Imagine if we had implicated anyone and got them nine years in jail.4
Smyth’s condemnation of Conlon was perfectly understandable given that, when he was arrested, Conlon identified the aunt with whom he had stayed when he first came to London, Anne Maguire, as the bomb-maker, which in turn led to the arrests of the other members of the Maguire Seven. However, to lay the blame entirely at Conlon’s feet presupposes that the physical abuse and psychological cruelty that Smyth and his co-accused suffered was on a par with that meted out to Conlon, when it was not so. Conlon’s interrogations included being hooded, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and bedding, starved of food and water, and being beaten continuously; the Maguire Seven did not experience anything similar. That aside, the question arises: would it be right to blame Conlon for a confession that was extracted out of him under extreme duress? The heartbreaking irony in Smyth’s criticism is that here was the innocent blaming the innocent for the brutality and inhumanity of the guilty. On a more practical note, Gerry Conlon’s confession would not, on its own, have been enough to secure the convictions of the Maguire Seven: the jury accepted the fraudulent forensic evidence that all the accused had handled explosives. The tragedy in Smyth’s bitter accusation was that it was clearly heartfelt and was shared by others of the Maguire Seven, but that does not make it any less irrational.
A new era had opened for Gerry Conlon, when, amid much handshaking, backslapping, autograph-signing and shouts of ‘Welcome home, lads’, Paul Hill and he climbed onto the stage at a Birmingham Six rally outside the GPO in Dublin’s O’Connell Street on 5 November 1989. Plucked from the obscurity of their prison cells, both men now enjoyed celebrity status, especially Conlon, whose Old Bailey display had endeared him to Irish people everywhere. Conlon told the 2,000-strong crowd that he was ‘very happy to be standing here amongst my own people’. He went on to say: ‘I don’t want any other Irish person to come out of a British prison like my father did – in a box.’ Continuing in the same vein, he said: ‘There is no British justice for Irish people.’5
Yet, once the initial euphoria of his release had worn off, Conlon admitted that he was finding it difficult to adjust and to come to terms with freedom. In an ITV documentary, The Guildford Four: Free to Speak, Conlon spoke frankly about how he was ‘longing for Gartree and my friends’. With a sense of deep foreboding, he said: ‘I feel like I am a more responsible person now. But I am deeply scarred and I am badly emotionally affected, and I don’t know if I am ever going to be really happy again.’6
Like a jack-in-the-box, Sir Norman Skelhorn, the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the Guildford pub bombings, popped up again in the news, when the alibi statement of Charles Edward Burke was released by BBC’s Newsnight on 14 November 1989. Unlike in the film In the Name of the Father, where he was portrayed as an elderly vagrant, the real Charlie Burke was a young man who had a steady job working in a greengrocer’s shop. Burke and a Belfast man called Patrick Carey had shared
