Gerry conlon autobiography range

As one of the 'Maguire Seven', Conlon’s father, Giuseppe, was also wrongly convicted, after being arrested on a trip to London to talk to solicitors for his son. He died in prison in Lorenzo Moscia, 49, was a university student in Rome when he saw Jim Sheridan’s movie, In the Name of the Father, about the Conlons’ miscarriage of justice story.

It changed Moscia’s life. He was captivated by Gerry Conlon’s ordeal. It inspired him to become a lawyer like Gareth Peirce, the solicitor who helped overturn the Guildford Four’s wrongful convictions.

After a couple of years working as a lawyer, Moscia switched lanes and became a photojournalist, spending 15 years working in South America. When he returned to Rome to live, Gerry Conlon was still at the back of his mind. He wondered how Conlon had fared. Using his contacts at the Guardian newspaper, Moscia got in touch with him. Conlon agreed to do a two-hour interview.

Moscia travelled to Belfast in January and ended up staying for three weeks. Ten days were spent travelling around the city with Conlon, shooting hours of footage and interviewing him in Conlon’s kitchen, with Moscia’s video camera propped up on a cigarette pack. It was the last interview Conlon gave before dying in June Moscia, who was in Brazil covering the World Cup at the time, was bereft.

Moscia teamed up with a producer, Ines Vasiljevic, to work on a gripping documentary about Conlon’s life, entitled In the Name of Gerry Conlon, which features interviews with key players in Conlon’s harrowing drama. These include Peirce; Paddy Joe Hill, one of the Birmingham Six; Paddy Armstrong, one of the Guildford Four; and Alistair Logan, a solicitor for the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, and a man who became a surrogate father to Armstrong and Carole Richardson, who was only 17 years old when she was imprisoned as one of the Guildford Four. She died from cancer in

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Irish Accents, Foreign Voices: Mediated Agency and Authenticity in In the Name of the Father and Fifty Dead Men Walking

Nicole Ives-Allison

Abstract

Given the intensity of narrative contestation over the public history of and discourse around the modern period of Northern Irish civil conflict known locally as ‘the Troubles’, for filmmakers from outside of Northern Ireland to be seen as making a legitimate contribution to existing debates, there is a pressure for their film texts to be read as ‘authentic’. This desire for authenticity fundamentally shapes the narrative approach taken by these filmmakers. Various filmmaking strategies have been employed in the pursuit of authenticity, but both Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father () and Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking () have taken a distinctly narrative approach, relying upon local written autobiographical material. However, the way in which Sheridan and Skogland have sought to deploy the authenticity embedded in locally grounded source material flirts with self-defeatism as both films problematically obscure the limitations on agency imposed by the filmmakers on the local voices upon who claims of authenticity, and thus the films’ legitimacy, depend.

Both In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, ), based on Gerry Conlon’s autobiography Proved Innocent: The Story of Gerry Conlon, and the Guildford Fourand Fifty Dead Men Walking (Kari Skogland, ), based on Martin McGartland’s eponymous memoir, provide interesting case studies for how authenticity and agency are negotiated and managed in the creation of films dealing with Northern Ireland’s recent troubled past.[1] The central argument of this paper is that by grounding their films in the autobiographies of individuals directly involved in the Troubles-related events depicted on screen, both Sheridan and Skogland effectively tap into the proximiity-based authenticity of the local written narratives as a means of strengthening the perceived a

Paddy Armstrong is one of the so-called "Guildford Four", wrongly convicted of a pub bombing in Guildford, Surrey. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and spent 15 years in jail. Paddy Armstrong was released in along with Gerard Conlon, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson, after a long campaign culminated in a ruling that the four's original convictions were "unsafe". This edited extract from Paddy Armstrong's new autobiography 'Life After Life' describes the period following his release.

We’re tearing through the streets of London. Alastair’s driving and there’s another man in the car with us. Alastair introduces him to me.

“This is a friend of Jim MacKeith.” I nod. “Nice to meet you.”

I can’t remember who Jim MacKeith is. I barely know my own name at the moment. I’m going to stay with this man, MacKeith’s friend, for a couple of days, they explain. Until the press have gone.

Instead of my usual entourage of armed guards, policemen with handcuffs, armoured trucks and sirens, there’s high-powered motorbikes and revving cars following us, taking every corner at breakneck speed so they don’t lose us. There’s cameras flashing whenever they get close enough to the dark glass concealing me from the world and people stopping on the street to stare.

This isn’t really how I imagined freedom.

Alastair Logan is my solicitor. He’s driving us around and around. “We need to get rid of them,” he’s saying. “On the next bend we’re going to slow down. And then you’re both going to jump out as I slow down. I’ll keep driving so they don’t realise you’re gone and they’ll keep following me.”

He seems to be saying that we’re both going to jump from the car. Me and this man. While it’s moving.