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 a room in the Hope House Hostel on Quex Road, London, with Conlon and Hill. In his 1975 statement to police, Burke said that, at the time of the Guildford pub bombings, he had been with Conlon in the hostel and that Conlon had been drunk and had tried, unsuccessfully, to borrow a pound from him. It subsequently emerged that Crown Counsel had written to the Guildford Four defence counsel on 13 August 1975, and had given them a list of witnesses who had been interviewed by police but whom the Crown would not call on at the trial. Unsurprisingly, Charlie Burke’s name was not on the list. Neither was that of Sister Michael Power, a nun who worked in the hostel and who had made a statement to police confirming that her records showed that Burke had been in the hostel on the day of the Guildford pub bombings (this strengthened Burke’s alibi statement). It was not until 1989 that Conlon’s then solicitor, Gareth Peirce, uncovered Burke’s and Power’s statements. Peirce and fellow Guildford Four solicitor, Michael Fisher, berated Sir Norman’s department, accusing the DPP of a cover-up. Fisher said: ‘Paul Hill’s case has always been under considerable pressure. He invented and elaborated upon a cock-and-bull story knowing that it couldn’t be corroborated, that he and the others named had alibis, and, therefore, believing that it wouldn’t stand up in court. What then happened was that steps were taken to ensure that his cock-and-bull story did stand up in court.’7
Sarah Conlon, as ever, was worried for her big son. At his own expense, he was organising a lobbying campaign on behalf of the Birmingham Six, and he was preparing to go alone, if necessary, to the United States on 5 November. Sarah prevailed upon Gerry’s cousin Martin Loughran to accompany him on the trip, saying that he would have been out of prison a mere seventeen days by the time he set forth for the US and he needed someone to guide him. Martin, who was six years older than Gerry, was working on building sites in London and his initial reaction was to refuse the request: ‘I told my Aunt Sarah that I couldn’t leave my work. But she pleaded with me. She said, “He really, really needs somebody – family.” And I only went because his mother, as I say, had asked me. I did it for my aunt Sarah and my mother.’
While in Washington, Conlon and Loughran stayed with Kerry Bowen of the human rights organisation, American Protestants for Truth about Ireland. ‘Just down from Kerry’s apartment in Connecticut Avenue there was a bar called Murphy’s, and the barman was called Paddy Joe Walsh,’ Martin Loughran recalls, ‘and he was a scream, a real ducker-and-diver. Paddy Joe was from the Falls area. He and Gerry got on like a house on fire, and he showed us around Washington.’ After the sightseeing, Conlon was out of the traps, meeting with important US politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties, including Congressmen Brian Donnelly, Ted and Joe Kennedy, and the Speaker of the House, Tom Foley. Martin Loughran has a vivid memory of Conlon’s meeting with Joe Kennedy:
We met Joe Kennedy in his office. He was a nice fella and was, by a long shot, the most interested politician we met. He asked questions and he listened intently. You could tell he was genuine. Anyway, after Gerry had said his piece and answered all Joe’s questions, Joe sat back, put his hands behind his head and his feet up on his desk, and remarked that he was going to Ireland soon to do a bit of fishing. I have to give it to Gerry. He saw an opportunity and pounced on it. Gerry said to him, ‘Why don’t you go to England and visit the Birmingham Six when you’re over? Visit Paddy Hill; he’d appreciate seeing you.’ And Joe kinda looked away as if, you know, tossing it over in his head, and then he looked back and said, ‘That’s not a bad idea. Yeah, I’d like that.’8
On 20 November 1989, it was reported in The Irish News that, ‘Two of America’s most influential politicians are to visit the Birmingham Six after meeting Gerard Conlon of the Guildford Four.’9
The congressman was as good as his word. In 1990, Joe Kennedy went up the Falls Road in Belfast, and while there, dropped into the Conlon home in Albert Street. He later went to England to visit the Birmingham Six. ‘They wouldn’t let him in to visit Paddy Hill at that time, although he eventually did get in to see Paddy around July 1990, I think,’ Martin Loughran said. ‘But it was all about the publicity and all that came about with Gerry asking Joe to visit the Birmingham Six.’
It wasn’t long after their