Hill, was a highly respected and compassionate Hungarian-American politician. He was also the co-chair of the influential Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a bipartisan group representing 200 members of Congress. The traditional focus of the caucus had always been human rights abuses in totalitarian countries such as the Soviet Union, South Africa, China and Cuba, but occasionally its attention was drawn to human rights violations in democratic countries. United States politicians had rarely taken more than a cursory look at British human rights abuses, but that was all to change irrevocably, and it was Gerry Conlon who would be the catalyst for that change.
During his meetings with Kennedy and Conlon, and after listening to the Irishman’s impassioned presentation, Lantos pledged that the case of the Birmingham Six would be the subject of the caucus’s first hearing in the new year. If Conlon thought this breakthrough was a cause for celebration, he did not show it. There was still work to be done.
After Conlon’s success in Washington, he and Loughran went to New York. The socialist human rights activist Sandy Boyer remembers getting a phone call in his Brooklyn apartment and a Belfast voice saying, ‘This is Gerry Conlon. I’m in New York for the Birmingham Six, and my lawyer, Gareth Peirce, told me to get in touch with you.’ Sandy later learned that this was high praise from Gerry. ‘If Gareth recommended somebody, Gerry was sure he or she could be trusted. He had complete faith in her.’10
Gerry, Martin and Gerry’s girlfriend, Diana St. James, met Sandy Boyer that afternoon in O’Reilly’s pub (then Joyce’s pub), at Sixth and 31st, and they discussed how to shape the Birmingham Six campaign in the United States. Forty-five-year-old Boyer was impressed with Conlon’s political nous: ‘We agreed immediately that it had to be as mainstream as possible, and that any connection with NORAID (the Republican Movement’s fund-raising organisation) or republicanism would be fatal. I then began to suggest people whom Gerry should meet.’
With fifteen years of high-octane energy in the tank and the passion of someone who not only knew his own worth, but who saw himself as being on a sacred mission, Conlon hurled himself into the task of obtaining the release of the Birmingham Six. Boyer recalls: ‘Gerry moved from one contact to the next and he quickly moved beyond the people I knew. He kept checking in with me, partly because he needed to talk to someone who knew the scene, and, maybe more, because he needed to talk to someone who had no agenda beyond the Birmingham Six.’
Conlon expressed his appreciation in a radio interview, hosted by Boyer, in 2013:
As you know, Sandy, you were one of the first people I met in America when I got out and you helped open doors – for Ed Koch (the former mayor of New York); you got me to Cardinal O’Connor, and your help was invaluable in securing the release of the Birmingham Six because you facilitated me and you pointed me in the right direction. And I remember when I took the delegation of Paul Dwyer, Brian Donnelly, Joe Kennedy and met Charlie Rangel and people like that. And we met Jack O’Dell from the Rainbow Coalition and of course Tom Lantos, a great congressman from California, who gave us a congressional hearing on human rights’ abuses on Irish people in British prisons.11
Conlon certainly had the Irish gift of the gab, but he baulked before the presence of Cardinal John O’Connor, a prelate who upheld the sanctity of life, whether that be in the womb or on death row. Boyer had arranged for Conlon to meet Cardinal O’Connor after Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. ‘By that time, Gerry was living on the edge of his nerves,’ Boyer says. ‘We were supposed to meet the cardinal at the left side of the altar after the Mass. When no one was there, Gerry turned and bolted out the door. In a few minutes someone found out that we were supposed to meet at the cardinal’s residence. I had to take off and try to catch up with Gerry. Fortunately I guessed right and he was going down Fifth Avenue. Gerry seemed to get a lot of comfort from talking to the cardinal. Afterwards he told me the cardinal asked if the people with him were friends and warned him against hangers-on.’
In an interview with New York’s Irish Echo 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