The Guidlford Pubs bombings were carried out by the IRA on October 5, 1974. These 2 attacks led to the explosion of the Seven Stars Pub and the Horse and Groom in Guildford, UK, killing 5 people and seriously injuring 65 others. The British forces then did everything in their power to track down the culprits, even if it meant accusing innocent people, and imprisoned them for over 15 years on terrorism charges. The story of the biggest miscarriage of justice in English history.
October 5, 1974: when bombs exploded in two British pubs, killing young British people, the British people entered a period of hysteria. With the IRA claiming responsibility for the attacks, the English police embark on a never-ending hunt to punish the culprits.
As the weeks went by, a wave of anti-Irish sentiment emerged throughout England, fanning new tensions between London and Northern Ireland, already overrun by British armor and barbed wire.
Faced with so much pressure from the English people, the British forces arrested 4 young Irish hippies for minor offences involving squatting, theft and drug use. These 4 Irishmen, nicknamed“The Guidlford Four” by the press, are :
The 4 young men were arrested under the Anti-Terrorism Prevention Act, which allows British forces to detain them for 7 days without charge. After a week of tough interrogation involving violence, torture, beatings and psychological intimidation, the police managed to “break” the 4 Irishmen, and extracted full confessions from them.
During their trials, the defendants defended themselves by claiming that their confessions had been wrongly extracted through torture, drug treatment and direct threats against their families, but the court did not hear the case and sentenced them to life imprisonment or 30 years’ imprisonment.
But the victims of this miscarriage of justice are not the only ones to suffer from the relentlessness of the British legal system. Another group, the Maguire Seven, is also wrongly convicted and imprisoned in this case. They are Gerry Conlon’s family members, including his father Patrick “Giuseppe” Conlon, his aunt and his 14- and 16-year-old cousins, most of them charged with making or possessing explosives. Here is an overview of their sentences, pronounced at the trial on March 4, 1976:
All served their sentences and were released from prison, with the exception of Giuseppe Conlon, who shared a cell with his son Gerry Conlon, and died in January 1980 of lung disease.
Throughout the period of their detention, Gerry Conlon and Giusseppe Conlon attempted to appeal, requesting a review of the trial. In 1989, an investigator made a breakthrough when he discovered that some of Patrick Armstrong’s interrogation transcripts had been altered. (Some passages would have been deleted, while others would have been summarily invented to fit the police scenario). This element allows the appeal to be relaunched, exposing the imposture of the British police and their gigantic miscarriage of justice.
The Guildford Four were immediately released, with the exception of Patrick Armstrong, who was released only a few days later, having also been cleared of the 1994 murder of a British soldier in Northern Ireland, of which he was also innocent.
Although the Guildford Four were eventually found innocent, Gerry Conlon fought from the moment of his release to claim the innocence of his father Giuseppe, who had died in prison.
Irish director and producer Jim Sheridan made the film, “Au Nom du Père”, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Emma Thomson, based on the auto-biography written by Gerry Conlon himself during his prison sentence.
The Bogside Attacks in Northern Ireland 
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