In the Name of the Son. Richard O’Rawe

prevented him from being raped.20

      Conlon started smoking marijuana at the age of sixteen and had sustained the habit in and out of prison. Occasionally he snorted cocaine and took ecstasy tablets, usually at a party or a rock concert. Frank Murray, the manager of The Pogues, has vivid memories of himself and Conlon hanging around together in Camden Town at the start of 1990: ‘He was full-on, you know? Anything that he couldn’t do in there [in prison], he was trying to do out here; he was trying to live the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties, all in one month. As a friend, it was very hard to go to Gerry and say, “Look, I think you’re overdoing it a bit” because he’d been in jail for fifteen years and he felt he had the right and it was like, “Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do.”’21

      On 29 August 1990, Kenneth Baker, the British Home Secretary, referred the Birmingham Six case back to the appeal court, on the basis of further fresh evidence becoming available. In this instance, the fresh evidence was of a forensic nature, which called into question the veracity of tests carried out by Home Office forensic scientist Dr Frank Skuse, whose original examinations indicated that, when arrested, four of the six prisoners had nitroglycerine on their clothing. It was the end of an era for Gerry and all those who had campaigned for this day. It was a victory, but even in victory there sometimes lurks the aura of defeat. At a stroke, gone was the raison d’être for Conlon’s post-prison existence. The campaign was over, at least until the appeal was heard. What to do?

      Tens of thousands of pounds in compensation was being sent to Conlon by the British government, and he spent it as if there was no tomorrow. The working-class lad from Belfast now had enough money to indulge practically any flight of fancy that engaged his imagination: an idyllic situation, many would say, but, for the emotionally disturbed Conlon, being given a pot of gold was the equivalent of an alcoholic being handed the keys of a bar and being told to lock the doors behind him on his way home.

      Cut adrift from the cause that had consumed his life since he had come out of prison, Conlon now had time to seek a fair wind, and on his journey he found plenty of fair-weather friends. He wanted to fit in, to claw back those lost years, to be ‘like the same fella I was when I went in’. He frequented Irish bars, chased women and generally tried his best to have a good time in the company of lads who reminded him of his own youth.

      It was an impossible situation. For a start, I had money and they were all on the sites or else on the dole, and I felt guilty as hell about that. I’d buy everything, all the drink, all the meals; the lot. It got to the point where I needed the hangers-on because I just didn’t like being on my own. But, the strange thing is, I didn’t regard them as hangers-on because I didn’t feel I was deserving of anything more than they had. The only way to deal with that was to give the money away.22

      He brought his friends to Manchester United and to Glasgow Celtic football matches, where he would have spent thousands of pounds on drink and drugs. He also brought some friends on holidays to Mexico, Jamaica, and other exotic locations and again footed the bill. Paddy Armstrong and he took a holiday in Goa, in western India.

      One who was not a hanger-on but who was amongst the most prominent people in Conlon’s life in the early years after his release was Joey Cashman – a Dubliner and the tour manager of The Pogues. In September 2015, sitting in an alcove of the Marine Hotel in Dublin’s northside, Cashman raises his glass of vodka and Red Bull and says: ‘To Gerry Conlon – the bollocks!’ The glass does not reach his lips before an irreverent laugh erupts from him. Cashman has long grey hair that flaps over his left eye, a goatee beard, and he is dressed entirely in black, with winkle-picker shoes. ‘I loved the guy,’ he says. ‘Me and him, man, we were best buddies; if I were to tell the stories … I’m off seven drugs, you know: crack, heroin, ordinary coke, weed, uppers, downers – hey, I’m even off nicotine. Got there all on my own. When I go to the clinic, I insist they take a sample every week.’

      Cashman brushes the hair away from his left eye, looks around and turns back. ‘Do you think he’s listening in?’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Gerry.’

      ‘Course he is!’

      ‘Hey, Gerry-man! You’re still a bollocks!’ Cashman bursts into another fit of unfettered laughter. He is clearly enjoying reminiscing about his buddy. ‘I think, I can’t be sure, but I think I met Gerry for the first time backstage at The Palladium in New York on the day before Saint Paddy’s Day 1990, but I’d only time to shake hands with him and leave it at that.’ Later they met in a pub in London and afterwards went back to Cashman’s house off the Prince of Wales Road in Camden, where they traded stories all night. Cashman smiles when he talks about his friend from Belfast:

      We might have had a line or two of coke, but we didn’t need it; we were both speedy people anyway. And me and Gerry, we clicked on so many levels, and then we became totally inseparable, so even when we were at different meetings, we’d still ring up during the day and make arrangements to go out that night. And if I could’ve talked for Ireland, he could’ve talked for the United Nations. But we’d some great laughs that night in my gaff. There was this one story that he thought was particularly funny.23

      Joey explained that The Pogues had started working on their third album, If I Should Fall from Grace with God, in May 1977, and one of the tracks on the album was ‘Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six’, written by Terry Woods and Shane MacGowan. The idea for the song had come from Frank Murray, during a conversation with Shane MacGowan, and it was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in April 1988 because it contained ‘lyrics alleging that some convicted terrorists are not guilty and that Irish people in general are at a disadvantage in British courts of law.’ Commenting on the ban, Murray said: ‘The Pogues will continue to write about what they want and we hope every other artist does the same.’ For MacGowan it was a challenge that he was more than willing to take on: ‘Banned for what? It’s straightforward police state repression of freedom of speech and its censorship.’ For the free-spirited Pogues, the ban had to be defied.

      On 12 November 1987, The Pogues were playing Queen’s University in Belfast. Joey Cashman recalls:

      For some reason, Frank Murray wasn’t with us, so I’m standing in for him. Anyway, I’m in my hotel room and I get a phone call, and a very stern voice says, ‘Are you the manager of The Pogues?’