THE TRAGEDY OF A STOLEN LIFE
This amazing moment should have been the beginning of a new life for Gerry Conlon but as a new book recalls, it sparked years of drug abuse, suicidal thoughts and reckless spending, as he remained ravaged by guilt over his father’s death
ALMOST three decades on, it is still one of the most electrifying moments in television history. A slightly built, tousle-haired man storms out the front door of the Old Bailey to deliver a brief and impromptu speech to the crowds who have gathered to see a moment that few expected ever to happen. The anger and righteous passion in his voice could hardly have surprised anyone. Minutes earlier Gerry Conlon — officially known for the previous decade and a half as prisoner 462777 — had been standing in the dock of Court Number Two, where he had originally been convicted of the Guildford pub bombings. Flanked by his two sisters, he got straight to the point after finally being cleared. ‘I’ve been in prison for 15 years for something I didn’t do. For something I didn’t know anything about. A totally innocent man,’ he roared into a microphone. ‘I watched my father die in prison for something he didn’t do. He is innocent. The Maguires are innocent. Let’s hope the Birmingham Six are freed.’
Anyone who saw that news footage from London on October 19, 1989, is unlikely to forget it. It was a statement of just 49 words, but it struck a chord right across the world.
No matter how much viewers at home were moved, it was obviously a far more exhilarating and emotional experience for Conlon himself. Little did he know then, however, that the years ahead would see him rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s most powerful politicians, socialising with the showbusiness jet-set and having an apparently bottomless pit of money at his disposal.
But he probably expected even less to face more misery than he had endured through all those years locked up in some of Britain’s toughest jails. The horrors that awaited him included addiction to class A substances, self-loathing, suicidal thoughts and reckless spending that ultimately reduced him to eating discarded food from hotel bins.
Perhaps the grimmest irony of all is that just as he finally appeared to be finding peace, he fell ill and died at the age of 60.
The story begins on March 1, 1954, when Gerard Conlon — the only son and eldest child in a family of three siblings — was born in the Lower Falls Road area of west Belfast. His father Giuseppe worked in a lead factory; his mother Sarah was a cleaner in the kitchens at the Royal Victoria Hospital.
Aged 20, Conlon moved to London to escape reprisals from the IRA for his involvement in petty crime. But he was back home in Belfast when he was arrested over the Guildford outrage, which occurred at 8.50pm on October 5, 1974. Five people were killed and dozens injured as a result of the explosion in The Horse and Groom, a pub frequented by members of the British army.
Little over a year later, the Guildford Four were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial judge recommended that Conlon, who had effectively been tortured during the interrogation process, should serve a minimum of 30 years.
Meanwhile, the so-called Maguire Seven — members of Conlon’s immediate and extended family, including his father — received jail terms of up to 14 years on bomb-making charges. Giuseppe had only travelled to London to see what he could do to help in the aftermath of his son’s arrest.
By the time of that stirring address outside the Old Bailey, Giuseppe was already nine years dead. Still, Gerry immediately threw himself into the fight to clear his father’s name and get the Birmingham Six released.
But the problems that dogged him for the remainder of his life were already in evidence within hours of his release. Minutes after TV images were beamed across the world showing him with a clenched fist raised aloft, Conlon was driven by limousine to a celebration party at the Holiday Inn in Swiss Cottage, north London.
There was a champagne reception on arrival, followed by a marathon night of revelry. But as revealed in a new book by Richard O’Rawe, a former republican prisoner and friend of Conlon’s since childhood, the then 35-year-old ‘felt uneasy about the pervasive attention’ almost from the beginning.
The party later moved to his ~penthouse suite, where the mini-bar had to be continually restocked.
But Conlon had a panic attack at around 5am and retreated to his mother’s room to tell her how miserable he felt.
It was a feeling that hadn’t come totally out of the blue. ‘I remember the night before I got out, looking up at the sky through the bars of Brixton prison and crying,’ he told an interviewer the year before he died. ‘Not crying with joy, but crying with anticipation of what lay ahead of me... because this had become my home.’
But Conlon — a lifelong pacifist — managed to occupy himself during his early days of freedom by campaigning tirelessly on behalf of the Birmingham Six, who were eventually released in 1991. His best-selling memoir, Proved Innocent, was published the same year.
Even by that stage, however, he was on a downward spiral. He was spending vast amounts of his interim compensation payments on drink and drugs, as well as bringing newly found friends to Manchester United matches and on holidays to Mexico, Jamaica and other far-flung destinations.
Meanwhile, he was moving in social circles that included Johnny Depp and members of The Pogues. And his life story was, of course, about to be made into the Oscar-nominated film In The Name Of The Father, in which Daniel Day Lewis took the lead role.
But things had changed after he tried crack cocaine for the first time at a party held in his Tufnell Park, north London flat in October 1992. When he attended the Oscars in 1994, he ended up spending much of the ceremony smoking the drug in the toilets with a friend.
It later emerged that he had roamed around London with a McDonald’s bag stuffed with £30,000 in cash as he looked for a dealer.
‘Looking back, I can see that I wilfully put myself in danger,’ he said in a 1997 interview. ‘I’d go to the worst places where people had a crack pipe in one hand and a gun in the other, mad places full of low life, places where I didn’t have to be because I had money. But I’d go in there and buy stuff and start handing it out free.’
Handing stuff out for free came easy to Gerry Conlon. He admitted trying to make up for the lost years by hanging out with people who reminded him of his own youth, but said it was ‘an impossible situation’.
He explained: ‘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,
‘I can see that I wilfully put myself in danger’ He was moving in social circles with Johnny Depp
His money went on ‘crack, girls, fags and booze’
All the drink, all the meals, the lot. It got to the point where I needed hangers-on because I just didn’t like being on my own.
‘But the strange thing is, I didn’t really regard them as hangers-on because I didn’t feel I was deserving of any more than they had. The only way to deal with that was to give the money away.’
According to the book, In The Name Of The Son: The Gerry Conlon Story, the £120,000 he received from the movie was gone within six weeks — most of it allegedly went on crack cocaine. A former girlfriend named only as Angie is quoted as saying that he was ‘doing ounces and ounces of crack a day’. Due to his fear of dealers he owed money to, he reportedly slept with a knife under his pillow.
Aside from his book deal and the money he made from In The Name Of The Father, Conlon had been awarded around £300,000 in compensation by 1995. He received another £240,000 in January 1997 as a final settlement of his case, despite being warned by his lawyers to hold out for a bigger sum.
Later he admitted accepting the money because he needed it to buy drugs. ‘He got a quarter of a million quid and we spent the lot in nine months, maybe 12,’ said Angie, a fellow addict at the time.
She added that ‘the whole lot went on taxis, crack, girls, fags and booze. And he gave everybody everything’. The book baldly states that they were ‘so broke they ate throwaway food from Mayfair’s hotel bins’ at one stage.
There were other mishaps along the way. In February 1997, he pleaded guilty at Belfast magistrates’ court to punching a police officer. Six years earlier Conlon had thrown glass tables into a hotel swimming pool in Crete after taking a number of ecstasy tablets. Meanwhile, he was plagued by suicidal thoughts. Even though he had never considered taking his own life in jail, he recounted one incident where he urged himself to jump in front of an oncoming Tube train at Westminster station. Conlon later agonised over not ‘having the balls’ to go through with it.
One of the main things tormenting him was the fact that neither he nor his family had been given a proper apology by the authorities, although that came in 2005. But the over-riding issue was that he blamed himself for landing his father in jail. According to O’Rawe’s book, friends said he started smoking 100 cigarettes a day because he ‘wanted to get emphysema and suffer as Giuseppe had suffered’. Conlon later told his psychotherapist that he ‘shouldn’t have done it’ [signed a confession] and that he had ‘killed my father’. He also noted that ‘other people in Northern Ireland were tortured — they didn’t crack’.
By 2001, he replied to an interviewer who asked if he had any memories of being happy: ‘None at all.’ There followed a period of ill health during which he contracted TB and other conditions.
But his final years seemed to bring him some kind of peace. He was in a steady relationship, went on a number of Caribbean cruises and — as a man who hadn’t always been the luckiest of gamblers — even won $2,000 on the poker tables of Las Vegas. Meanwhile, he also developed an interest in the theatre and West End musicals.
Best of all, he managed to wean himself off drugs. After moving back to Belfast following years split between London and Devon, however, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2014. Weeks later he was dead.
‘Life dealt Gerry a pretty poor hand,’ said his longtime solicitor Gareth Peirce in her funeral eulogy. ‘He was a gambler, and gambling was in his DNA, but with a poor hand he made a magnificent fist of it. If anyone thinks that this is someone who was beaten or terrified and pushed down forever, that wasn’t so. With all the adversities, in the end Gerry Conlon won — the victory was his.’
In The Name Of The Son: The Gerry Conlon Story by Richard O’Rawe, is out now, published by Merrion Press, price €17.99