By Michael Onesi
One moment he was a free man asleep in his bed. The next thing Gerry Conlon remembered was being awakened by the screams of a gun-drawn SWAT team. He was beaten and tortured for four days by corrupt police officials until finally signing a confession admitting he and his best friend killed seven people on Oct. 5 1974 after bombings in two Guildford pubs.
Conlon spent 15 years in jail and his father, aunt, uncle and cousins were also imprisoned. They were all innocent. his father died in a prison hospital. Conlon lives to see justice previl.
Millions of viewers know his story through In the Name of the Father, a film where Daniel Day-Lewis plays Conlon. He is in Toronto for several speaking engagements.
When we meet, Gerry Conlon is having breakfast in his hotel restaurant. He sits down at the restaurant bar with a smoke and a cup of coffee. Despite being out late last night drinking, Conlon is hangover-free. With his long hair, forty-something body and raspy Irish voice, he speaks about finding his freedom and adjusting to daily life.
“The fact that I could either go out of my house or stay in, the fact that I could switch channels on my television is something,” he says.
The right to choose overcame Conlon on his first trip to a supermarket, two days after his release. Conlon jokes that he had to come out and be brought back six or seven times.
“In prison, there were two brands of shampoo. I suddenly found myself confronted with 2,000 brands of shampoo. One for this type of hair, one for that type of hair, wash your hair on a Friday, don’t wash it on a Saturday.”
Conlon also had to adjust to the noise levels on the outside. “Prison is a very silent world. You could tell who was walking past your cell by the patter of the person’s feet.” But walking the streets of London, Conlon compares the overpowering noise of traffic to the famous helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now. “The noise of cars and buses and motorcylcles was so extreme.” But even after five years, Conlon says he has not fully adjusted to regular life. “I think that for the rest of my life, I will still have the insecurities that prison breeds within you…the insecurities of wondering who you really are.”
Since his release, Conlon has been campaigning around the world for human rights but he would not call himself an activist. “I would go so far to say that I’m concerned with human rights abuses, whether they happen in Northern Ireland, Britain, Spain or anywhere in the world…I feel morally bound to do something because it was people who I didn’t know who campaigned for me so I have to give back what was given to me.”
When you talk to Gerry Conlon, you feel like you are talking to somebody from the local pub. He is very friendly and asks to be called Gerry instead of Mr. Conlon. You wonder how a jury of 12 people could believe this gentle person would kill seven people.
He says Britain doesn’t want to admit they are wrong because their legal system is portrayed as the best in the world.
When asked how much compensation he wants, Conlon is unsure. “I can’t put a figure on it because I can’t figure what 15 years of somebody’s life is worth.”
What will it take for him to trust the British police again? Conlon has several recommendations.
“For lawyers to have access to suspects when they are arrested. That lawyers be allowed to be with the suspect when they are being questioned. There should be taped confessions, that way you can’t have the tampering or re-writing of statements that are attributed to the defendant.”
Not surprisingly, Conlon’s scars ripped open by the British Judiciary haven’t healed. “I can have faith in individual policemen I meet, but as a collective body, I don’t have any faith in the British police, not at the moment.”
Conlon also attacks prison authorities for having no rehabilitation process for it’s inmates.
He says during his time in prison he saw the same people coming back after their releases. “The prison authorities never questioned why (these) men come out of prison after ten years and go back and do the same (crime). It’s because that they didn’t try to help him in the first place.”
He wants more education programs in prison instead of petty chores prisoners assigned to prisoners. “If you put people in prison and they are making meaningless things like socks for ten years, you feel like you have nothing to offer the world when you come out. Prisoners come out with no hope. The only thing they come out with is more violence and desperation.”
The one question Conlon gets asked about all the time is about the movie. But for Conlon, his mother’s opinion of the film was more important. “She loved it,” he says.
The one thing Conlon didn’t love was what he called the lack of institutional violence in the movie. If he were the director he would have added scenes showing solitary confinement. “I spent three and a half years in solitary confinement and it had a major effect on me…(There was also) no focus on the way the system controls the prisoners (through violence and forced injection of mind altering drugs).”
But overall, he thought the director, Jim Sheridan did a great job. “The fact that he was honest with me when the film was made. He told me ‘We have to compromise. We can’t show everything that happened.’ I understood. Sixteen years of somebody’s life being condensed into two hours and twenty minutes is a difficult job.”
The final question to Conlon is “Do you think the public will ever be able to grasp what you went through?”
“Hopefully, you will never have to grasp it. Prison is the loneliest and most horrible place in the world,” he answers.
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