Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four: an ex-IRA man reveals the true story

Gerry Conlon's coffin is carried through the streets of Belfast in 2014. One of the Guildford Four wrongly imprisoned for an IRA bombing, he spent 15 years in jail before the verdicts were overturned. During their trial, the judge had expressed regret they hadn't been charged with high treason, which had a mandatory death penalty. Photo / Getty Images

Ricky O’Rawe used to kick around the war-torn streets of Belfast with Gerry Conlon. He talks to Joanna Wane about his childhood friend’s “tortured soul” and bringing one of Britain’s worst miscarriages of justice to life on the stage.

In real life, Gerry Conlon wasn’t quite as good-looking as Daniel Day-Lewis, the actor who played him in the Oscar-nominated film, In the Name of the Father — the story of how a bunch of hippies were stitched up by police for the IRA bombing of an English pub. Five people died in the blasts and another 65 were wounded.

The Belfast boy who became a cause celebre embraced by the likes of Johnny Depp and the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan didn’t lack for charisma, though. Nor did he lack for friends when he was finally freed in 1989 after 15 years in jail and blew a million pounds (money from his compensation payout and lucrative film and book deals) on his favourite things in life: drugs, drink and women.

“He was a charmer who could talk the leaves off the trees,” says Ricky O’Rawe, whose one-man play about Conlon, In the Name of the Son, is about to open at the Auckland Arts Festival. A former IRA activist, O’Rawe was in prison himself when his close childhood friend was arrested and knew immediately he had nothing to do with the

Years later, he was back by Conlon’s side as the 60-year-old’s coffin was carried along Belfast’s notorious Falls Rd, where so many violent clashes at the height of the Irish Troubles had taken place. “He was an incredible individual who led the most tragic yet uplifting life. I loved him like a brother. It’s been an awful wrench that he hasn’t been about.”

Belfast writer and former IRA prisoner Richard O'Rawe at the gravesite of his lifelong friend, Gerry Conlon, one of the wrongfully imprisoned Guildford Four.

O'Rawe, left, and Conlon grew up a stone's throw apart in the Lower Falls area of Belfast and remained lifelong friends.

The author of several best-selling books, O’Rawe is 70 now and still passionately committed to a united Ireland, despite leaving politics behind him long ago. In 1981, he was the IRA’s press officer in Long Kesh prison during the notorious H-Block hunger strike that saw Bobby Sands and nine other paramilitary prisoners starve themselves to death.

O’Rawe grew up on the same Belfast street as Conlon, who died from lung cancer in 2014. First published as a book and then adapted for the stage in collaboration with Irish playwright Martin Lynch, In the Name of the Son is a stirring account of one of the most grievous miscarriages of justice in modern British history. Four members of the IRA’s Balcombe Street Gang who claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Guildford pub and gave statements to the police were never charged.

The Guildford Four, as Conlon and his three co-accused became known, did make confessions but these were later found to have been extracted through coercion. Conlon’s father, Giuseppe, who’d come to London to support his son, was also swept up by the investigation and jailed on trumped-up charges alongside other family members dubbed the Maguire Seven. The youngest was a 14-year-old boy. During their trial, the judge expressed regret the Guildford Four hadn’t been charged with high treason, which carried a mandatory death penalty.

Years later, every single conviction would be officially overturned. By then, it was too late for Giuseppe (played by Pete Postlethwaite in the 1993 feature film). “He was a lovely man who ended up dying in a British prison,” says O’Rawe. “Gerry carried that guilt his whole life. And that is the overwhelming thread of the play, that here was a tortured soul who found comfort in drugs and women.”

Gerry Conlon emerges from London's Old Bailey a free man in 1989 after spending 15 years in prison. Photo / PA

Dark years lay ahead for Conlon after that famous black and white photograph was taken of him as a free man, arms lifted triumphantly outside London’s Old Bailey. A suicide attempt. Two nervous breakdowns. A descent into drug addiction. Somehow, he pulled himself back from the brink and became a respected human rights campaigner who travelled the world speaking out against miscarriages of justice.

In a bizarre twist of fate, O’Rawe had spotted Conlon in a Belfast record shop days after his much-publicised release from prison. As they headed off to catch up over a drink, the pair bumped into a former IRA commander who’d not only shared a prison cell with O’Rawe in H-Block but saved a teenage Conlon from being kneecapped back in Belfast as punishment for some petty delinquency and given him the chance to escape to England. “The three of us got blotto.”

O’Rawe left the IRA in the early 90s when his wife, Bernadette, gave him a choice between the fight and his family. By then, he knew the armed struggle against British rule had failed. Militant groups such as the New IRA offer nothing but misery, he says. Now, 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement ended direct UK rule in Northern Ireland, younger generations believe a united Ireland is inevitable.

Daniel Day-Lewis as a young Gerry Conlon in Jim Sheridan's Oscar-nominated 1993 film In the Name of the Father.

Parting ways with the IRA wasn’t like leaving the Mafia — not for a respected figure like O’Rawe, anyway. What did cause a serious rift was his 2005 book, Blanketmen, in which he claims a deal that would have ended the H-Block hunger strike much sooner was cynically rejected by IRA commanders on the outside for political purposes. He and his family are still ostracised by some of his former cellmates, but he considers setting that record straight to be one of his greatest achievements.

O’Rawe, it seems, isn’t easily silenced. He’s still fighting to have the Guildford bombing case reopened and those who deliberately falsified or withheld evidence held to account. Irish actor Shaun Blaney, who’s giving a post-show talk in Auckland with In the Name of the Son’s director Tony Devlin, plays 32 different characters on stage, including Johnny Depp, who went on a wild road trip with Conlon after he was released from prison and was a contender to play him in the movie. Depp wrote the foreword to O’Rawe’s book, adding a personal note saying he’d done Conlon proud.“ And his family’s pain diminishes to a far more understanding of just how close to invincible the mad f**cker was.”

• In the Name of the Son: The Gerry Conlon Story is at Auckland’s Q Theatre, March 14-17.

Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.