Sarah Conlon

By Mary Kelly (for the Irish News)

When I was a student, I had a summer job in the canteen of the Royal Victoria Hospital, where, still bleary-eyed from the unaccustomed early starts, one of my jobs was to clean out the giant vats of stuck-on porridge.

I was shown the quickest way to do it by a small, neat woman called Sarah, who despite her diminutive stature, could haul the heavy containers as if they were feathers.

Most days she managed to do them herself as she told me it wasn’t a nice job for wee girls like me, and usually gave me something less onerous to clean. I soon learned she was Guiseppe Conlon’s widow.

He had died in jail just six months earlier, a victim of a justice system that imprisoned his son Gerry for 15 years along with the rest of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, and the Birmingham Six.

All served heavy sentences in a frame-up that still disgraces the UK judiciary and police.

Her colleagues told me how she had to save all her holiday leave, and her meagre wages, travelling to Britain to visit them, frequently journeying for hours by boat and train, only to discover her son had been moved to another jail without her being informed.

I think she may well be the closest I have come to being in the company of a living saint.

Her quiet resilience was shown in an RTE documentary this week about the last interview Gerry Conlon gave to Lorenzo Moscia, an Italian film-maker who had been moved to study law by the work of human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce.

She was the tireless advocate who took on those miscarriages of justice and finally won the day.

Another of the legal team, Alastair Logan, reminded viewers that the Guildford Four’s case is not truly over.

He said the convictions were known to be unsafe at the time, but they were achieved through wholesale perjury, forced confessions, forging of documents and evidence that was hidden from the defence team.

Senior police officers, the judge and the Director of Public Prosecutions were all later promoted, some receiving knighthoods. And the files surrounding the case have been sealed by the government for 75 years.

Logan, who is 81, is still fighting to have those documents released.

Gerry Conlon died in 2014, aged 60. He had suffered a life of torment in and out of jail, and it was only when he joined the Birmingham Six survivor, Paddy Hill, to work helping other victims of miscarriages of justice around the world, that he began to make peace with himself.

It would be a fitting tribute to him if the British government finally came clean and opened those files.

Urgent Appeal