her daughter Ann and her husband Joe McKernan, along with their one-year-old daughter, Sarah. Giuseppe, although gravely ill, was in reasonable spirits. Gerry was brought into the hospital wing, handcuffed to a prison officer, while another prison officer kept hold of a guard dog. The visit began and the usual pleasantries were exchanged. Suddenly Giuseppe’s gaze shifted to something or someone beyond the visiting party. Ann McKernan recalled:
I don’t know where my daddy got the strength from, but he pushed aside the bedclothes and got out of bed. We were telling him to get back into bed, but he wasn’t listening. Then he shuffled across the room to this man who was mopping the floor and grabbed him by his shirt. My daddy was right into the man’s face, and he said to him, ‘If I ever get you putting your eyes on my grandchildren again, I’ll personally kill you.’ We didn’t know who the man was or what was happening. Then our Gerry shouted, ‘It’s that bastard, Ian Brady!’ I didn’t know who Ian Brady was. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he was the Moors Murderer [Brady and his lover, Myra Hindley, murdered five children between 1963 and 1965 and buried their bodies on Saddleworth Moor]. Anyway, our Gerry jumped up and said, ‘Get the fuck out of here, you fucking bastard!’ Well, Brady dropped his mop and ran out of the wing, and we helped my daddy back to his bed. His breathing was shallow; the exertion had almost killed him. When he recovered his breathing, he sent for the doctor and told him, ‘See in future, when I’m getting visits, keep that animal away from my family.’ The doctor settled my daddy down.17
Despite being terminally ill with emphysema and lung cancer, Giuseppe Conlon’s fighting spirit never wavered, nor did his love for his family. This was never more apparent than when, several weeks later, Gerry was taken out of his cell in Wormwood Scrubs and brought to Hammersmith Hospital. He was led, handcuffed, into a room that was crowded with priests, Home Office officials, prison wardens, police officers and doctors. Gerry was taken to the side of his father’s bed. On seeing him, Giuseppe pulled away his oxygen mask and told Gerry: ‘I’m going to die.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re not going to die.’
‘Yes I am. Don’t be worrying. I want you to promise me something.’
‘Yes, okay.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Yes, I promise you.’
‘When I die, I don’t want you attacking no screws. I want you to start clearing your name. My death’s going to clear your name and when you get your name cleared, you clear mine.’18
Nine more years would pass before Gerry’s name would be cleared, while Giuseppe’s name would not be fully cleared until Tony Blair, as British prime minister, apologised to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven in February 2005.
It was towards the end of those nine years that Gerry Conlon first met Paddy Joe Hill, one of six men falsely accused of the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974, in which twenty-one people died. Conlon had an instant special affection for Paddy Hill, and Hill was similarly struck with Conlon:
When me and Gerry were together, it was fucking mayhem. When we [the Birmingham Six] were brought to Long Lartin for our appeal, I went over to Gerry’s wing, and I said to the screws, ‘Is Conlon on the wing?’ and one of them says, ‘Aye, he’s up the stairs’ and I shouts up, ‘Conlon, get your fucking arse down here, and bring your snout, and your money, and your fucking drugs.’19
In Proved Innocent, Conlon confirms that a dynamic presence had arrived on the prison wing that night:
I was up in my cell when I thought I heard my name. It was yelled out amid an unholy commotion that had suddenly swept into the wing, a bellowing Irish voice that I’d never heard before.
‘Conlon, you gobshite! Get your arse down here.’
I thought I must have misheard, so I didn’t move. The third time I couldn’t mistake my own name being roared out.
‘CONLON! Get fucking down here, now.’
I saw this small, solid, and incredibly animated figure, leaning against the railing at the bottom of the stairs, giving out to all these people around him. His dentures had been damaged when he was beaten at Winson Green prison, so you hardly ever see the man with teeth. His mouth is like one of the puppets on Rainbow [a children’s TV programme], the one with the zipper over his lips. But I’d like to see someone brave enough to try to zipper Paddy’s mouth.
He looked up, recognized me at once and stuck his hand through the railing.
‘What took you so long, you bollocks? Paddy Joe Hill, good to meet you, son.’20
With the Birmingham Six appeal imminent, and with an outside chance of being released, Hill pledged to Conlon: ‘Well, if I get out at this appeal, you’re coming out too. Because I’ll be going everywhere, doing whatever I can for you. OK?’21
On 28 January 1988, the appeal of the Birmingham Six was turned down, and Hill was returned to prison to serve out his life sentence. In prison, character is the cement that holds a person together, and Paddy Hill had character to give away. If he was entertaining pangs of despair, Hill soon fought them off, convincing himself that he could see a ‘light shining at the end of the tunnel more brightly than ever before’.22 He was right inasmuch as there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but it would shine, first, on the Guildford Four, not on the Birmingham Six.
‘It was on the 16 October 1989. I’ll never forget it,’ Paddy Hill said in Belfast in 2015. ‘After Long Lartin, Gerry and me was moved to Gartree, and we’d been knocking about together for nearly two years. Now, we were sitting in the workshop and a screw says to Gerry that he has to go back to his cell immediately. I went with him, and when we got to the wing, the Principal Officer told him, “There’s a van waiting to take you to London immediately.”’23After helping Conlon to pack up his meagre belongings, Hill walked him over to the prison reception. ‘He was nearly crying,’ Hill recalled, ‘but I said to him, “Never fucking mind that. Just do what you have to do.” And fair play to him, when he got out, he did the business.’
While Gerry Conlon no doubt pondered his fate in the back of a prison van as it made its way to London’s Brixton Prison, his family in Belfast was unaware that anything was afoot. The next day, however, a phone call from Gerry’s solicitor in London, Gareth Peirce, would change everything.
Ann and Joe McKernan had been buying wallpaper in Belfast city centre and on their way home they stopped at a shop in Church Lane which sold religious items. For Ann it was a weekly chore: ‘My mother had been buying her candles out of the holy shop every Tuesday for fifteen years, ’cause Tuesday was St Martha’s day, and St Martha’s was the patron saint of servants and cooks, and for my mammy coming out of work, we had to have her candles there.’24
It was 11.05 a.m. and the McKernans had just got into their family home at 52 Albert Street in the Lower Falls area when the phone rang. Joe answered it. He listened carefully, put down the phone and turned to Ann: ‘That was Gareth Peirce. She says Gerry’s getting out on Thursday.’ At Ann’s insistence, Joe rang Gareth back and she reiterated her message, saying to Joe, ‘Go tell Mrs Conlon.’
The McKernans got a taxi up to the Royal Victoria Hospital, where Sarah Conlon had worked as a catering assistant for sixteen years. ‘I cried all the way there,’ Ann said. ‘When I told her, she collapsed against the wall. She couldn’t believe it. It was such a shock.’ If Sarah Conlon’s faith in the power of prayer had been challenged during those lonely, desolate years, she never showed it and now it seemed as if her prayers had been answered. But sometimes good news can be too good and, like a geyser, a degree of scepticism now burst forth, with Sarah casting doubt on the veracity of what Ann and Joe were telling her. Eventually Ann persuaded her mother that Gerry was about to be released, and Sarah left work to the cheers and applause of her workmates.
Money was tight and times were hard. Flying to London was an expensive business for a working-class Belfast family. Sarah was troubled, Ann remembers. ‘She kept repeating, “How am I going to get over to London for our Gerry’s appeal?”’ Trying to come to terms with one miracle – the imminent