Читать книгу In the Name of the Son - Richard O'Rawe - Страница 12

Two

‘I hope your arse is well greased, Hill.’

‘It’s buttered-up like a big Belfast bap, Conlon.’

‘It’d better be ’cause I’ve a wee parcel here to keep you entertained in them there dark nights.’1

As he casts his agile memory back to his visit with Gerry Conlon in Gartree Prison on 28 October 1989, Paddy Hill lifts a rolled-up cigarette from the glass dining table and lights up. He inhales deeply and exhales slowly. How did Gerry smuggle in the hash and the tobacco? ‘Between his bum cheeks,’ Hill answers matter-of-factly. And how did the transfer take place? ‘Gerry looked around to see if any screws were watching and, when he saw there wasn’t, he shoved his hand down the back of his trousers and when it came back up again, there was a cylindrical parcel wrapped in cling-paper in it.’ Hill takes another draw on his cigarette. ‘The next thing, he casually reached over the table to me, as if shaking my hand, and passed me the parcel. I bangled [secreted in rectum] it immediately. “There’s two ounces of snout and two ounces of hash in there”, he said. Believe me; that brought a smile to my face.’

It still brings a smile to his face. Hill casually relights his cigarette. It does not seem to have crossed his mind that, just over a week after Gerry had thundered out of the Old Bailey, declaring to the world that he had spent fifteen years in prison for something he did not do, and after being on the front page of practically every newspaper in the western hemisphere, Gerry Conlon had risked being returned to prison for smuggling two ounces of hash into prison.

‘Nah, that wouldn’t have happened. Y’see, we knew all the moves.’2

But in the jungle of everyday life, outside of prison, Gerry barely knew any moves, and in the years after his release, he would return to a recurring theme: ‘There are days when I wish I was still in prison.’

It is not hard to see why there was a brotherly bond between Conlon and Hill: they were both intelligent, had the same lively nature and were fighters at heart. In an interview with The Irish News on 23 October 1989, Conlon said:

You wouldn’t believe how emotionally attached I am to Paddy Hill. He uses thirty quid a week on stamps to write to people to highlight his case – he doesn’t stop working and every letter he wrote mentioned the Guildford Four and every letter I wrote mentioned the Birmingham Six. So I couldn’t live with myself if I did nothing about the Birmingham Six, because I know if Paddy Hill were sitting here now talking to you, Paddy Hill’s thoughts would be with me as my thoughts are with him.3

Other people’s thoughts were with Gerry Conlon and some of them were not that friendly. Seán Smyth, who, as one of the Maguire Seven, had been sentenced to eleven years in prison, could never be accused of couching his criticism of Conlon in soft terms:

The person I blame to the day I die for those lost years is Gerry Conlon. He had no call to do that. He should have kept his mouth shut. We all did. I got beatings, threats, psychological torture – the lot, but I never once admitted anything or implicated anyone. I remember watching Gerard Conlon on television when he got out of the Old Bailey. Okay, so he was innocent. He didn’t deserve to be in prison but if it wasn’t for him we would never have been in prison either. Any of us. He is running around like Jack-the-Lad. Imagine if we had implicated anyone and got them nine years in jail.4

Smyth’s condemnation of Conlon was perfectly understandable given that, when he was arrested, Conlon identified the aunt with whom he had stayed when he first came to London, Anne Maguire, as the bomb-maker, which in turn led to the arrests of the other members of the Maguire Seven. However, to lay the blame entirely at Conlon’s feet presupposes that the physical abuse and psychological cruelty that Smyth and his co-accused suffered was on a par with that meted out to Conlon, when it was not so. Conlon’s interrogations included being hooded, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and bedding, starved of food and water, and being beaten continuously; the Maguire Seven did not experience anything similar. That aside, the question arises: would it be right to blame Conlon for a confession that was extracted out of him under extreme duress? The heartbreaking irony in Smyth’s criticism is that here was the innocent blaming the innocent for the brutality and inhumanity of the guilty. On a more practical note, Gerry Conlon’s confession would not, on its own, have been enough to secure the convictions of the Maguire Seven: the jury accepted the fraudulent forensic evidence that all the accused had handled explosives. The tragedy in Smyth’s bitter accusation was that it was clearly heartfelt and was shared by others of the Maguire Seven, but that does not make it any less irrational.

A new era had opened for Gerry Conlon, when, amid much handshaking, backslapping, autograph-signing and shouts of ‘Welcome home, lads’, Paul Hill and he climbed onto the stage at a Birmingham Six rally outside the GPO in Dublin’s O’Connell Street on 5 November 1989. Plucked from the obscurity of their prison cells, both men now enjoyed celebrity status, especially Conlon, whose Old Bailey display had endeared him to Irish people everywhere. Conlon told the 2,000-strong crowd that he was ‘very happy to be standing here amongst my own people’. He went on to say: ‘I don’t want any other Irish person to come out of a British prison like my father did – in a box.’ Continuing in the same vein, he said: ‘There is no British justice for Irish people.’5

Yet, once the initial euphoria of his release had worn off, Conlon admitted that he was finding it difficult to adjust and to come to terms with freedom. In an ITV documentary, The Guildford Four: Free to Speak, Conlon spoke frankly about how he was ‘longing for Gartree and my friends’. With a sense of deep foreboding, he said: ‘I feel like I am a more responsible person now. But I am deeply scarred and I am badly emotionally affected, and I don’t know if I am ever going to be really happy again.’6

Like a jack-in-the-box, Sir Norman Skelhorn, the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the Guildford pub bombings, popped up again in the news, when the alibi statement of Charles Edward Burke was released by BBC’s Newsnight on 14 November 1989. Unlike in the film In the Name of the Father, where he was portrayed as an elderly vagrant, the real Charlie Burke was a young man who had a steady job working in a greengrocer’s shop. Burke and a Belfast man called Patrick Carey had shared a room in the Hope House Hostel on Quex Road, London, with Conlon and Hill. In his 1975 statement to police, Burke said that, at the time of the Guildford pub bombings, he had been with Conlon in the hostel and that Conlon had been drunk and had tried, unsuccessfully, to borrow a pound from him. It subsequently emerged that Crown Counsel had written to the Guildford Four defence counsel on 13 August 1975, and had given them a list of witnesses who had been interviewed by police but whom the Crown would not call on at the trial. Unsurprisingly, Charlie Burke’s name was not on the list. Neither was that of Sister Michael Power, a nun who worked in the hostel and who had made a statement to police confirming that her records showed that Burke had been in the hostel on the day of the Guildford pub bombings (this strengthened Burke’s alibi statement). It was not until 1989 that Conlon’s then solicitor, Gareth Peirce, uncovered Burke’s and Power’s statements. Peirce and fellow Guildford Four solicitor, Michael Fisher, berated Sir Norman’s department, accusing the DPP of a cover-up. Fisher said: ‘Paul Hill’s case has always been under considerable pressure. He invented and elaborated upon a cock-and-bull story knowing that it couldn’t be corroborated, that he and the others named had alibis, and, therefore, believing that it wouldn’t stand up in court. What then happened was that steps were taken to ensure that his cock-and-bull story did stand up in court.’7

Sarah Conlon, as ever, was worried for her big son. At his own expense, he was organising a lobbying campaign on behalf of the Birmingham Six, and he was preparing to go alone, if necessary, to the United States on 5 November. Sarah prevailed upon Gerry’s cousin Martin Loughran to accompany him on the trip, saying that he would have been out of prison a mere seventeen days by the time he set forth for the US and he needed someone to guide him. Martin, who was six years older than Gerry, was working on building sites in London and his initial reaction was to refuse the request: ‘I told my Aunt Sarah that I couldn’t leave my work. But she pleaded with me. She said, “He really, really needs somebody – family.” And I only went because his mother, as I say, had asked me. I did it for my aunt Sarah and my mother.’

While in Washington, Conlon and Loughran stayed with Kerry Bowen of the human rights organisation, American Protestants for Truth about Ireland. ‘Just down from Kerry’s apartment in Connecticut Avenue there was a bar called Murphy’s, and the barman was called Paddy Joe Walsh,’ Martin Loughran recalls, ‘and he was a scream, a real ducker-and-diver. Paddy Joe was from the Falls area. He and Gerry got on like a house on fire, and he showed us around Washington.’ After the sightseeing, Conlon was out of the traps, meeting with important US politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties, including Congressmen Brian Donnelly, Ted and Joe Kennedy, and the Speaker of the House, Tom Foley. Martin Loughran has a vivid memory of Conlon’s meeting with Joe Kennedy:

We met Joe Kennedy in his office. He was a nice fella and was, by a long shot, the most interested politician we met. He asked questions and he listened intently. You could tell he was genuine. Anyway, after Gerry had said his piece and answered all Joe’s questions, Joe sat back, put his hands behind his head and his feet up on his desk, and remarked that he was going to Ireland soon to do a bit of fishing. I have to give it to Gerry. He saw an opportunity and pounced on it. Gerry said to him, ‘Why don’t you go to England and visit the Birmingham Six when you’re over? Visit Paddy Hill; he’d appreciate seeing you.’ And Joe kinda looked away as if, you know, tossing it over in his head, and then he looked back and said, ‘That’s not a bad idea. Yeah, I’d like that.’8

On 20 November 1989, it was reported in The Irish News that, ‘Two of America’s most influential politicians are to visit the Birmingham Six after meeting Gerard Conlon of the Guildford Four.’9

The congressman was as good as his word. In 1990, Joe Kennedy went up the Falls Road in Belfast, and while there, dropped into the Conlon home in Albert Street. He later went to England to visit the Birmingham Six. ‘They wouldn’t let him in to visit Paddy Hill at that time, although he eventually did get in to see Paddy around July 1990, I think,’ Martin Loughran said. ‘But it was all about the publicity and all that came about with Gerry asking Joe to visit the Birmingham Six.’

It wasn’t long after their meeting that Kennedy and Conlon met Congressman Tom Lantos. Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor on Capitol Hill, was a highly respected and compassionate Hungarian-American politician. He was also the co-chair of the influential Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a bipartisan group representing 200 members of Congress. The traditional focus of the caucus had always been human rights abuses in totalitarian countries such as the Soviet Union, South Africa, China and Cuba, but occasionally its attention was drawn to human rights violations in democratic countries. United States politicians had rarely taken more than a cursory look at British human rights abuses, but that was all to change irrevocably, and it was Gerry Conlon who would be the catalyst for that change.

During his meetings with Kennedy and Conlon, and after listening to the Irishman’s impassioned presentation, Lantos pledged that the case of the Birmingham Six would be the subject of the caucus’s first hearing in the new year. If Conlon thought this breakthrough was a cause for celebration, he did not show it. There was still work to be done.

After Conlon’s success in Washington, he and Loughran went to New York. The socialist human rights activist Sandy Boyer remembers getting a phone call in his Brooklyn apartment and a Belfast voice saying, ‘This is Gerry Conlon. I’m in New York for the Birmingham Six, and my lawyer, Gareth Peirce, told me to get in touch with you.’ Sandy later learned that this was high praise from Gerry. ‘If Gareth recommended somebody, Gerry was sure he or she could be trusted. He had complete faith in her.’10

Gerry, Martin and Gerry’s girlfriend, Diana St. James, met Sandy Boyer that afternoon in O’Reilly’s pub (then Joyce’s pub), at Sixth and 31st, and they discussed how to shape the Birmingham Six campaign in the United States. Forty-five-year-old Boyer was impressed with Conlon’s political nous: ‘We agreed immediately that it had to be as mainstream as possible, and that any connection with NORAID (the Republican Movement’s fund-raising organisation) or republicanism would be fatal. I then began to suggest people whom Gerry should meet.’

With fifteen years of high-octane energy in the tank and the passion of someone who not only knew his own worth, but who saw himself as being on a sacred mission, Conlon hurled himself into the task of obtaining the release of the Birmingham Six. Boyer recalls: ‘Gerry moved from one contact to the next and he quickly moved beyond the people I knew. He kept checking in with me, partly because he needed to talk to someone who knew the scene, and, maybe more, because he needed to talk to someone who had no agenda beyond the Birmingham Six.’

Conlon expressed his appreciation in a radio interview, hosted by Boyer, in 2013:

As you know, Sandy, you were one of the first people I met in America when I got out and you helped open doors – for Ed Koch (the former mayor of New York); you got me to Cardinal O’Connor, and your help was invaluable in securing the release of the Birmingham Six because you facilitated me and you pointed me in the right direction. And I remember when I took the delegation of Paul Dwyer, Brian Donnelly, Joe Kennedy and met Charlie Rangel and people like that. And we met Jack O’Dell from the Rainbow Coalition and of course Tom Lantos, a great congressman from California, who gave us a congressional hearing on human rights’ abuses on Irish people in British prisons.11

Conlon certainly had the Irish gift of the gab, but he baulked before the presence of Cardinal John O’Connor, a prelate who upheld the sanctity of life, whether that be in the womb or on death row. Boyer had arranged for Conlon to meet Cardinal O’Connor after Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. ‘By that time, Gerry was living on the edge of his nerves,’ Boyer says. ‘We were supposed to meet the cardinal at the left side of the altar after the Mass. When no one was there, Gerry turned and bolted out the door. In a few minutes someone found out that we were supposed to meet at the cardinal’s residence. I had to take off and try to catch up with Gerry. Fortunately I guessed right and he was going down Fifth Avenue. Gerry seemed to get a lot of comfort from talking to the cardinal. Afterwards he told me the cardinal asked if the people with him were friends and warned him against hangers-on.’

In an interview with New York’s Irish Echo on 2 December 1989, Conlon said that he had met Cardinal O’Connor on the previous two Sundays, and he found him to be ‘very honest, sincere and aware’.

For the remainder of his life, Gerry Conlon straddled two continents. He had a great affection for the United States, and over the years would become a regular visitor to that country. But he liked coming home, whether that home was in Belfast or London. At the end of November 1989, he returned to Ireland just in time to appear on RTÉ’s prime television talk show, The Late, Late Show, along with Paul Hill. Earlier, the Irish Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey, had met both men and had given them his credit card on the understanding that they should use it to fit themselves out with new clothes. It was an offer neither man could refuse, and when they appeared alongside the show’s host, Gay Byrne, they were suitably attired in designer suits. When Byrne asked Conlon what he would like to do now, he replied that he would like to go to the World Cup football finals in Italy the following summer. A travel agent, watching the interview, wrote to Conlon offering him and Hill a free trip to Italy. Conlon immediately took up the offer.

In that same month, Conlon was given a £50,000 interim compensation payment from the British government. It would be the first tranche of £546,000 that he would eventually receive. Conlon was unimpressed: ‘They gave me £546,000 for taking me, torturing and framing me, taking my father, torturing him and having him in prison; then leaving me sinking in the quicksand of my own nightmares.’ He went on to say that, ‘Giving money to victims of miscarriages of justice is like giving them a bottle of whiskey and a revolver. You may as well say, “Here’s the money, now go and kill yourself.”’12 Conlon did not go and kill himself, but he thought about committing suicide many times as he struggled to readjust to a normal life. It could be argued that, when he moved away from Belfast and his family home in 1974, Conlon lost all sight of what a normal life looked like. He had lived in squats and hostels, had been unable to hold down a job and had begun experimenting with drugs.

At four o’clock on the afternoon of 9 December 1989, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong, and relatives of the Birmingham Six led the ‘Parade of Innocence’ through central Dublin to celebrate the release of the Guildford Four and to highlight the continued incarceration of the Birmingham Six. As dusk fell, 10,000 people lit candles and walked behind them. Around 200 costumed actors, some on floats, played the parts of prisoners, judges, policemen and torch-bearers. When the parade reached the River Liffey, a boat made of tabloid newspapers from the 1975 media campaign against the Guildford Four, Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six was ceremoniously burned. Three hours after the parade had begun, the last of the marchers reached the Central Bank plaza where they were treated to passionate speeches from Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill and the former MP for Mid-Ulster, Bernadette McAliskey, amongst others.

At the end of the pageant, the manager of The Pogues, Frank Murray, introduced himself to the ex-prisoners and brought them around to Blooms Hotel in Temple Bar. After a few drinks, arrangements were made to meet up later. Several hours after that, Murray was in a bar and restaurant called ‘Suesey Street’ in Leeson Street.

You could drink fairly easy there. You could definitely get wine and champagne after hours, and every so often the police would come in, but we knew they were coming in so the wine bottles and the drink would disappear off the tables for ten minutes until the police went away. Well, I heard this commotion outside the door, you see, so I went to have a look out and saw the security men and Gerry, and sharp enough, he recognised me immediately and shouted over, ‘Frank! Frank, it’s me.’ Once I told the security men who they were, they were let in. So we went to the bar and we were having a drink for about five minutes and word got around and all of a sudden Gerry was swarming with women and they were saying hello to him, and Gerry, naturally enough, was in like Flynn. That was Gerry; he had a glint in his eye, a beautiful mischievous glint that the women loved.13

On his release from prison, Conlon wanted to live in Belfast with his family, but Belfast is a relatively small city, made even smaller by the sectarian divide that dissects it. One of the consequences of this tribal divide at the time of Conlon’s release in 1989 was the omnipresence of loyalist assassins, who opted to believe the hints emanating from certain British newspapers that Conlon had been guilty and had been released only by dint of a judicial faux pas. In light of this, loyalist paramilitaries would have viewed him as a particularly desirable target. Moreover, the Conlon household was situated in the strongly republican Lower Falls, a district where the IRA and the British army frequently fought each other in gun battles. Gerry never hid the fact that he had inherited his father’s pacifist views, and his forthright rejection of war and political violence was interpreted by some within his own community as somehow being anti-IRA. He was anti-IRA, but he was also anti-British army and anti-loyalist paramilitaries. Given the myopia and cataclysmic social upheaval that had infected Belfast and its citizens for over two decades at that time, it was hardly surprising that Conlon opted to get away from it all and live in cosmopolitan London.

He liked London and found the English generally endearing: ‘There is not a lot of bitterness in my heart. I feel bitter towards the judiciary, towards the police who framed me, who fabricated evidence, but I have nothing but time and respect for all the English people who helped, and there have been so, so many of them.’14 Later he would say, ‘English people are brilliant people.’15And so it was that Gerry moved into the detached Victorian house of Gareth Peirce and her husband, Bill, in London’s Kentish Town in December 1989. This was one of his better decisions because Peirce provided a degree of stability and good judgement that he badly needed. She understood him and had a feel for the mountains that all the miscarriage of justice victims would have to climb if they were ever to readjust back into society: ‘They [the Guildford Four] came out with no money and no counselling,’ she said. ‘They had no references. It’s difficult to open a bank account; you can’t get a mortgage. They have no GP. They don’t belong.’16

Gerry Conlon never professed to be a saint nor, in numerous subsequent press interviews, did he hide his failings and transgressions. Speaking bluntly of the time before he was arrested for the Guildford bombings, he said: ‘We [Paul Hill and he] were working on building sites. We were getting drunk; we were known to the community [a euphemism for being petty criminals]. We were fucking arseholes.’17 But that was then. Now he wanted a new beginning. He wanted to travel and to savour humanity in all its majesty. He was still only thirty-five years old, and he wanted to catch up with a life that had zipped passed him fifteen years earlier. Perhaps he saw Gareth Peirce as a bridgehead of sensibility, a sobering influence who, to some extent, cramped his style, but by the start of 1990 he was looking for his own accommodation.

Jeremy Corbyn, the future British Labour Party leader and the MP for Islington North, had highlighted the case of the Guildford Four, and he secured Conlon a small one-bedroom council flat in the Holloway Road area of north London. After buying a sofa-bed, Martin Loughran moved in with Gerry. It was a claustrophobic existence, far removed from the home comforts of Gareth and Bill’s house, but crucially, the name Conlon was on the rent book. Before long, further compensation began to filter through, and Gerry was able to buy a two-bedroom basement flat in Tufnell Park, north London. Now he was, for the first time in fifteen years, the architect and builder of his own world.

‘When we moved into Tufnell Park, I went back to my work on the building sites,’ Martin Loughran says. ‘Gerry was a whirlwind. He was still very active on the Birmingham Six front – I remember he went to a big conference in Copenhagen – but he was also meeting people and partying. Y’see, Gerry made friends easily. And he was a party-animal. I didn’t like parties; I preferred a quiet pint in my local pub.’ Loughran has no recollection of Conlon taking any drugs other than marijuana:

I would say his biggest vice in those days was his gambling. He had no appreciation of money. He just saw money as a means to get him where he wanted to go and then just rake it up. I saw me sitting in the flat in Tufnell Park and there was a bookies way down the street, and he’d say to me, ‘There’s a grand. Away and put it on such and such a horse.’ And maybe it was beat. Broke my heart, like. But, then again, I’ve seen me walk into the bookies and take thousands from them and bring it back to him. Y’see, Gerry was a lucky gambler. He’d sit in the house and smoke a bit of blow, and his head would’ve been buried in the paper, studying the form; he knew when a horse was right and when it wasn’t. And he’d never have stood all day in a bookies like a lot of gamblers. And another thing, people have said he was an alcoholic. He wasn’t. No way. Certainly not when I was with him.18

David Pallister also felt the rush of Conlon’s personality. A reporter with The Guardian since 1974, Pallister had extensively covered the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. He had also been in both Guildford and Birmingham on the day after the explosions had occurred and had reported on both sets of appeals. Moreover, he had written copiously about miscarriages of justice. With these qualifications, it is little wonder that Gareth Peirce judged him to be the writer best suited to bring to life the Gerry Conlon story in a book.

At the solicitor’s invitation, Pallister first met Gerry in Gareth’s home in early 1990, where they collectively discussed the mechanics of the journalist ghostwriting Gerry’s biography. The reporter liked Gerry: ‘He was good company and we got on well. He remarked approvingly of my gait, “Just like you’d see on the Falls Road.”’19

From the outset, it was agreed that in order to give Gerry and David the best possible chance to concentrate on the task in hand, they had to get away from the many distractions of London. David’s suggestion of two weeks in sunny Tunisia went down exceedingly well with Gerry, but tying down the bon vivant to a strict work regime would prove problematic: ‘Even though he was tremendously engaging, very articulate, thoughtful and funny at the same time, it was sometimes hard getting him to stick to the bigger picture we were after,’ Pallister said. ‘But after the damage of fifteen years in prison I was content to be indulgent about his indiscipline and self-indulgence. The poor guy had been through hell and he was understandably angry and bitter.’

Pallister’s idea of going to Tunisia in the first place had been to find anonymity because Gerry had already attained a considerable media profile. While the idea was sound, it was only as foolproof as Gerry wanted it to be – and playing the role of the perennial bore did not come naturally to him. He was Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four, after all, and where was the harm in telling his fellow tourists that he was the man who had ridden out of the Old Bailey on a chariot of righteous indignation?

Even though it was always going to be a difficult commission for Pallister, the two men did manage to get through a substantial amount of work as they sat on the balcony of the journalist’s room every morning with a tape recorder. And every evening Pallister sent the tape of that day’s work back to London to be transcribed. A significant portion of what had been recorded pertained to Gerry’s survival exploits while in prison. Pallister said: ‘He had some highly amusing and graphic tales, which he recounted with relish. He also had stories of financial scams. He smoked dope all day. He had brought it in, he explained, wrapped in film between his buttocks.’

When they got back to London, Pallister was confronted by Gareth Peirce, who had had access to the recordings made in Tunisia. She was less than enthusiastic. ‘Gareth was unhappy about the stories of his exploits,’ Pallister said. ‘She wanted something more about the grief and the pain and his relationship with his father. There was pressure from the knowledge that Ronan [Bennett] was doing Paul Hill’s book [Stolen Years: Before and After Guildford],’ Pallister said. ‘Before I could progress, I was summarily taken off the project and paid off. I had a final highly emotional meeting with Gerry in a café on Kentish Town Road, close to Gareth’s house, where he laid out his true feelings.’

Robin Blake, another journalist, finished the book with Gerry. Tellingly, Pallister was not invited to the launch of Conlon’s book, Proved Innocent, in the House of Commons on 11 June 1990. He professed that he was ‘not bitter about all of this … but I was annoyed that the book turned out to be so dishonest.’20 No amount of coaxing would persuade Pallister to elaborate on what exactly had driven him to question the book’s honesty, or to give an account of his final meeting with Gerry in Kentish Town. Perhaps he believed that some things were better left unsaid.

Leaving things unsaid was not the way of the next set of characters to enter Gerry Conlon’s convoluted life. For Joey Cashman and Shane MacGowan, of the Irish punk rock band The Pogues, Gerry’s devil-may-care attitude to life paralleled their own laissez-faire philosophy. For the more circumspect Hollywood superstar Johnny Depp, Gerry was the ‘friend’ with whom he got drunk and raked about, while the two men and the Conlon family toured Ireland.

The lad was on the rocky road to somewhere – he just didn’t know where.