In The Name of Gerry Conlon: RTÉ documentary recalls injustice of Guildford Four
Gerry Conlon, centre, outside the courthouse in London after he was released in 1989. (Picture: Photopress Belfast)
Gerry Conlon was wrongly imprisoned, as one of the 'Guildford Four', for the IRA bombing of an English pub in 1974 which killed five people. Anyone who saw the moment on television in October 1989 when Conlon was finally released from the Old Bailey in London after his conviction was quashed will never forget it.
Conlon insisted on going out the front door of the courthouse, instead of being released discretely out a side door into a waiting taxi. With an arm raised by one of his sisters, he proclaimed his innocence with his dead father’s words echoing in his ears: “They put us in through the back door. You go out the front door and tell the world what they did to us.”
As one of the 'Maguire Seven', Conlon’s father, Giuseppe, was also wrongly convicted, after being arrested on a trip to London to talk to solicitors for his son. He died in prison in 1980. Lorenzo Moscia, 49, was a university student in Rome when he saw Jim Sheridan’s movie, In the Name of the Father, about the Conlons’ miscarriage of justice story.
It changed Moscia’s life. He was captivated by Gerry Conlon’s ordeal. It inspired him to become a lawyer like Gareth Peirce, the solicitor who helped overturn the Guildford Four’s wrongful convictions.
After a couple of years working as a lawyer, Moscia switched lanes and became a photojournalist, spending 15 years working in South America. When he returned to Rome to live, Gerry Conlon was still at the back of his mind. He wondered how Conlon had fared. Using his contacts at the Guardian newspaper, Moscia got in touch with him. Conlon agreed to do a two-hour interview.
Moscia travelled to Belfast in January 2013 and ended up staying for three weeks. Ten days were spent travelling around the city with Conlon, shooting hours of footage and interviewing him in Conlon’s kitchen, with Moscia’s video camera propped up on a cigarette pack. It was the last interview Conlon gave before dying in June 2014. Moscia, who was in Brazil covering the World Cup at the time, was bereft.
Moscia teamed up with a producer, Ines Vasiljevic, to work on a gripping documentary about Conlon’s life, entitled In the Name of Gerry Conlon, which features interviews with key players in Conlon’s harrowing drama. These include Peirce; Paddy Joe Hill, one of the Birmingham Six; Paddy Armstrong, one of the Guildford Four; and Alistair Logan, a solicitor for the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, and a man who became a surrogate father to Armstrong and Carole Richardson, who was only 17 years old when she was imprisoned as one of the Guildford Four. She died from cancer in 2013.
“The most difficult aspect of making the documentary was that the main character was not available,” says Moscia. “Gerry had passed away. OK, we got the money to make a good documentary. We could pay the editor, the musician, and so on. We could do something good. I knew we could build Gerry’s story not just from the interviews I had from his kitchen, but with other people in his life. We got so much material we could have made hundreds of documentaries.
“I spent so much time with Gareth Peirce, with Alistair Logan, with Paddy Joe Hill in Glasgow and his miscarriages of justice organisation (Mojo), where Gerry worked campaigning for wrongfully imprisoned people. Paddy Joe Hill is such a strong character. How can you build the story which Gerry – who is no longer with us – is still the centre? That was the challenge. I needed to make the spine with Gerry. At some point, the other characters needed to help Gerry – a man who had passed away 10 years ago – to tell the story. It was like being in the presence of a ghost.”
The details in the documentary are chilling, particularly the beatings the Guildford Four received in police custody. Conlon got his nose broken. Police also set dogs on him. He had to drink water from the toilet. He wasn’t allowed sleep. They forced a confession from him by threatening to get a rogue branch of the British military in Belfast to kill his mother. Once imprisoned, jail wardens opened his cell door in the morning so other inmates could attack him.
Moscia believes his solo filming style helped extract more intimate testimonies. “When I arrived in Dublin to interview Jim Sheridan, he said, ‘OK, where is the rest of the troupe?’ I said, ‘No, the troupe is me.’ I stepped into his kitchen with a bottle of red wine and two cameras. Being alone is an advantage. Sometimes I could have gone with more crew, but I said, ‘No, there’s going to be too much difference with the style of Gerry’s interview. It’s better if it’s just me and the interviewee in their kitchen.’
“Often you see a documentary and you can feel the presence of 15 people in the background milling around during an interview: the director, the person on lights, the cameramen, and so on. With me, it was just myself, a couple of Canon cameras, tripods, leads, microphone. It makes things more unguarded. It’s so difficult to get in touch with Gareth Peirce. If you see her interviewed online, you will never see her cry or get emotional."
In this film, however, the campaigning lawyer She’s like the Iron Lady, and she got emotional remembering Gerry at the end of the documentary.”
- In the Name of Gerry Conlon will be screened on RTÉ One television, on Monday, August 14
The director Jim Sheridan adapted Gerry Conlon’s autobiography, Proved Innocent, into a movie called In the Name of the Father. It was released in 1993. It starred Daniel Day-Lewis as Conlon, Pete Postlethwaite as his father, Giuseppe, and Emma Thompson as the lawyer Gareth Peirce. It was nominated for seven Oscars. Incidentally, Gareth Peirce has never watched the film.
“The name Giuseppe really attracted me,” says Sheridan in the director’s cut of the documentary, In the Name of Gerry Conlon. “I immediately thought the idea of a father/son story was very powerful – that that was the way to tell the Guildford Four story. Gerry was involved, but during the filming there were fights. There were arguments. I didn’t want to bar him from the set and say [he] couldn’t be there, but he was on the set. It wasn’t something he was big into.”
When the film was released, Conlon was upset with deviations the film script took from his autobiography. “Then after the movie, there were arguments,” adds Sheridan.
Conlon went to the film’s world premiere in Dublin, but didn’t speak with Sheridan for 15 years, according to the documentary maker, Lorenzo Moscia. They eventually ended up making peace, however.
