After Gerry Conlon’s IRA bombing conviction was overturned by the court of appeal in London, in 1989, he was encouraged to return to his cell while a taxi was arranged. He wasn’t having it, he tells Lorenzo Moscia towards the end of the Italian documentarian and photographer’s absorbing In the Name of Gerry Conlon (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm).
“I don’t want a taxi – I want to go out the front door,” Conlon says he remembers thinking. “All I could hear was my father’s voice saying, ‘They put us in through the back door. You go out the front door and tell the world what they did to us.’”
Conlon refused to quietly slope away to freedom, having been wrongly imprisoned as one of the Guildford Four, after the Provisional IRA’s bombing of two pubs in the town in southern England in 1974, which killed five people and injured 65 more.
He instead appeared outside the Old Bailey to deliver the soliloquy that Daniel Day-Lewis would bring to the screen in Jim Sheridan’s film In the Name of the Father. The address reaches its crescendo as he refers to his late father, Giuseppe, likewise wrongly convicted. “I watched my father die in a British prison for something he didn’t do,” Conlon says. “He is innocent.”
But if Conlon received the movie treatment, there would be no Hollywood ending. He was shaken by his years in prison and by Giuseppe’s death, at just 56. He cuts a troubled figure when Moscia tracks him down to Belfast in 2013 for Conlon’s final interview before he himself died, of lung cancer, in 2014. “Conlon was never at peace with himself,” one friend says. “He was a man chased by devils.”
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That conversation is a scoop for Moscia, who uncovers several horrifying revelations. Conlon says that mistreatment in prison contributed to his father’s death. “They took my father in just his pyjamas and a wheelchair and sat him out the front for over an hour in the cold weather,” he says. “They all stood inside watching him sat outside in a pair of pyjamas, and that is how he got pneumonia. I wasn’t allowed at his funeral.”
Conlon also speaks about the horror of life behind bars. “I seen two people being murdered in prison in front of me ... by the same man five years apart,” he says. “One he beat to death with the battery from a radio – he put it in a football sock and beat the guy. The other guy he stabbed to death ... with a 28-inch sword that he had made in a shop.”
The story will be familiar to anyone who saw In the Name of the Father. Sheridan’s searing film introduced Conlon and his story to the wider world, including Moscia in Italy. “I wanted to learn. I learn everything about his life,” the director explains off camera.
In the Name of Gerry Conlon provides a broad overview of the case. Moscia talks to Conlon’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who breaks down when thinking about Conlon’s death. He also interviews Patrick Maguire, one of the Maguire Seven falsely accused of running a bomb factory and thrown in jail by the British authorities. “I was 13 years old,” he says, describing how British police grilled him about “where your mother got her bombs from”.
This is a story of stolen lives. Its victims include those killed in the Provos’ bloodthirsty and cowardly campaign targeting British pubs. And they, of course, include the Conlons and Maguires, innocents caught up in Britain’s spasmodic thirst for vengeance.
Moscia’s interview with Conlon underlines how broken and angry the Belfastman was through his final years. It is a striking portrait of someone who lost everything. Free or behind bars, he was condemned to a life sentence of trauma and grief.
