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Never forget the Irish victims
By McGreevy
Twenty-five years ago last month, Guiseppe Conlon died in Hammersmith Hospital of complications relating to a respiratory illness.
In his final years, he had chronic emphysema and could only breathe in an oxygen tent. His health problems were compounded by his wrongful incarceration for crimes related to the Guildford bombings of 1974.
There was something uniquely terrible about what happened to Guiseppe Conlon. It wasn’t just that the Maguire Seven case was a farcical, sinister affair which shames British justice to this day.
Of the 17 Irish people wrongfully imprisoned — the Maguire Seven, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four — 16 of them lived to be vindicated and to see their freedom.
Guiseppe died a condemned man. Condemned in life, he was condemned too in death. British Airways refused to carry his coffin home to Belfast; Aer Lingus charged his widow Sarah £3,500. The Home Office then billed her for his repatriation.
Guiseppe Conlon wouldn’t have ended up in jail but for a confession by his son Gerry that was beaten out of him by the police.
Guiseppe went to London to find a solicitor for his son who had been convicted for the Guildford Four bombings. He stayed at the home of his wife’s sister Annie Maguire in Willesden.
Gerry Conlon told the police that ‘Auntie Annie’ kept a bomb factory. The police raided the house on December 3, 1974. Five members of the Maguire family, their uncle and Guiseppe Conlon ended up in jail.
Never mind that Guiseppe was an ex-Marine, that Paddy Maguire, Annie’s husband, was also ex-British Army.
It didn’t matter either that both he and his wife were members of the Paddington Conservative Club and had a bust of Winston Churchill on their mantelpiece, while their son had applied to join the police cadets.
They were Irish and that, in the febrile atmosphere of an IRA bombing campaign in Britain, was enough.
They were sentenced on the basis of the confession and discredited tests carried out by the Royal Armament Research and Development Laboratories.
Traces of nitroglycerine were found, but the amount was so negligible that the traces were destroyed in the original tests and there was no follow-up admissible in evidence.
Dr John Yallop, the test inventor, had warned the court against relying on it. He said the traces of explosives that were found were “not sufficient to give a definitive answers”.
The tests were never used before or afterwards following the Maguire Seven prosecution.
Their first appeal in 1977 was thrown out and it was only in the late 1980s that the British Government set up an inquiry headed up by Sir John May.
He demolished the prosecution case. The scientific tests were not only unreliable, he said, but the scientists involved had refused to reveal their own reservations about them. He also dismissed as inadmissible Gerry Conlon’s statement which was given under duress.
Yet, at the Court of Appeal in 1991, the three judges dismissed five of the six grounds of appeal forwarded by the Maguire Seven including the confession and the tainted scientific evidence.
In the words of Lord Justice McCowan, the seven were acquitted “on the ground that the possibility of innocent contamination cannot be excluded and on this ground alone”.
In other words, and in plain English, the judges were really saying that the Maguire Seven might or might not have been handling explosives, but there wasn’t sufficient evidence one way or the other to uphold their conviction.
This was typical of the bone-headed, grudging attitude that the British legal establishment adopted to a series of outrageous miscarriages of justices, casting a continuous slur on their good names.
It stopped well short of the absolute exoneration that the Maguire Seven were entitled to have been given and it is for this reason that Gerry Conlon is pursuing a public apology for his father’s wrongful incarceration.
Tony Blair has already apologised in private to the family, but Mr Conlon believes that only a public apology is sufficient for the harm that was done to his family.
Hopefully, Blair will make good his promise to do exactly that, perhaps as early as this week.
It is good too that the lead in this campaign, which is supported by The Irish News in Belfast, is being taken by Mark Durkan, the leader of the SDLP, and not by Sinn Féin.
The IRA bombing campaign and the miscarriages of justice that followed marked a terrible low point for the Irish community in Britain.
Let us never forget that the Maguire Seven, the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four were also victims of the Provisional IRA. We hope that we will never return to those awful days again.
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