UK commentary

Abstract

After fifteen years wrongful imprisonment in English gaols, the Guildford Four - Patrick Armstrong, Gerard Conlon, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson - were finally freed on 17 October 1989 when their convictions for the IRA pub bombings in Guildford and Woolwich were quashed by the Court of Appeal. The Director of Public Prosecutions had decided not to sustain the convictions, after major irregularities had been uncovered in the ways police had obtained their original confessions. The four had been arrested and charged with murder and other offences arising out of the bombing of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974, in which five people were killed. Hill and Armstrong were also charged with murder arising out of a similar pub bombing in Woolwich a month later. These bombings were part of a major IRA campaign on mainland Britain (which also included the Birmingham pub bombing in which twenty-one people died) and which continued beyond the arrest of the four. The Guildford Four received life sentences, the trial judge noting that had it not been for the abolition of capital punishment they would have been sentenced to hang. The four had always strongly asserted their innocence and insisted that their confessions had been obtained by force. A lengthy campaign had been waged for their release. Race & Class spoke to Gareth Pierce, solicitor for Gerard Conlon and other Irish prisoners, about the case and its implications, and about the policing of the Irish community in Britain.