Book review: Life after Life - A Guildford Four Memoir

Paddy Armstrong’s account of his wrongful imprisonment as part of the Guildford Four is harrowing. As a politically disengaged teenager of the ’70s, he was always an unlikely IRA man, as Anne Lucey discovers.

ON the night of October 5, 1974, when he was supposed to be detonating the pub bombs that killed five young people and inflicted horrific injuries on almost 70 in Guildford, 30 miles south west of London, Paddy Armstrong was mildly stoned and babysitting his English girlfriend’s dog in a squat in the West End.

In Belfast he had been “a politically disengaged teenager”, good looking, a sharp dresser, liked a bet, a bit of a smoke, a drink and was molly-coddled by a household of women.