LONDON BURNING

As fresh spasms of violence rock Belfast, two of Britain's hottest actors are championing their new movie, about the wrongful conviction of 11 innocent men and women for involvement in three brutal I.R.A. bombings. GRAHAM BOYNTON finds Emma Thompson, Daniel Dav-Lewis, and director Jim Sheridan under siege as the British establishment reacts to their controversial message

GRAHAM BOYNTON

'I don't give a fuck, quite frankly," says Emma Thompson. She says it in this quite impeccable, strangely hybrid, seemingly classless modern Brit accent. Somewhere between BBC English and suburban-London staccato, it doesn't sound at all vulgar, just emphatic, certain.

Thompson is responding to the bloodying she has been taking in the British press since accepting a role in what seems destined to become one of the more controversial movies in recent memory. In the Name of the Father is directed by Jim Sheridan, creator of the much-lauded My Left Foot and the brooding little masterpiece The Field. It centers on the wrongful conviction on murder and bombing charges of 11 people in mid-70s London who became known as the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven. From the start, all 11 protested their innocence. Not until 1989, however, were the convictions quashed and the Guildford Four released. (The Maguire Seven, with the exception of Guiseppe ConIon, who died in prison, had already served their full sentences by the time their convictions were overturned two years later.)

Sheridan's film, which opens in the U.S. just after Christmas, has been taking hits in the British press since shooting began last spring because it tackles the issue that for 25 years has divided British society like no other—the Irish Problem. It is likely to seem even more provocative now, given the latest wave of killings in Northern Ireland, which began when an Irish Republican Army bomb killed 10 (including two children) and wounded 60 Saturday-aftemoon shoppers in West Belfast. It escalated in late October into a series of tit-for-tat slayings carried out by the I.R.A. and its Protestant paramilitary enemies.

Such callous, wild-eyed slaughter of civilians has exacerbated the tendency of the great British public to view all Irish people as potential, if not actual, bombers and terrorists. It is a view fanned by the more reactionary elemerits of the British press, as Sheridan and his crew found out. In March, an I.R.A. Active Service Unit (A.S.U.) bombed a busy shopping mall in the North of England, killing two children; soon after, another bomb ripped apart the City of London, causing hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of damage. The press reared up in the wake of the bombings, taking to task not only Thompson but also her "fellow travelers," the "luvvies" (Private Eye slang for preening artistes) who were helping perpetuate the trouble by meddling in things they didn't understand.

:The courts were responsible for a miscarriage of justice on a scale unprecedented in Britain in this century."

Emma Thompson believes that the accused were victims of a terrible miscarriage of justice. This belief and the fact that she—the country's premier young actress—has chosen a "lefty alternative" film have had the conservative papers in apoplexy. London's Evening Standard suggested that Thompson's choice, following her Oscar for her rather less controversial role in Merchant Ivory's Howards End, was not "the wisest decision a British actress could make. Given the prevailing mood in Britain, it is likely to turn her from darling to rebel overnight."

Thompson shrugs her shoulders. "I have taken a part in a film that does not have a political bias, although it does tell a political story. This is a typical hysterical, knee-jerk reaction which is frankly an insult to the intelligence of our press. It's absolutely beneath them."

She plays Gareth Peirce, the civilrights lawyer who represented Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four. In the late fall of 1974, Conlon, Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong, and a 17-year-old working-class Londoner, Carole Richardson, were accused of being I.R.A. members and of planting time bombs in two Guildford pubs. Hill and Armstrong were also accused of throwing another bomb into a Woolwich pub.

They seemed an unlikely quartet of terrorists. Conlon and Hill worked days on building sites and sank pint after pint of Guinness in Irish pubs by night. Armstrong and Richardson lived in a North London squat, where they dropped acid, smoked dope, and generally drifted through their rather vague hippie days.

To some, it might appear that this motley crew of layabouts lacked the discipline and ruthlessness that make the Active Service Units such deadly urban guerrillas. But the police were under tremendous pressure, as indeed they are today, to stop the bombings, and the arrest of the Four brought a sigh of relief from the beleaguered British public. Confessions followed the arrests, extracted—the Four maintain—after beatings and threats. Gerry Conlon has said that during interrogation police squeezed his testicles, hit him in the kidneys, and slapped him around. "I was crying and frightened," he later said. "[An investigating officer] said that if I didn't make a statement he would ring Belfast first thing in the morning and I would never see my mother or sister again. The last of my resistance shattered when he said this."

Not long after the first arrests, a number of Conlon's relatives, including his father, Guiseppe, and the Torysupporting Maguire family, were arrested for making the bombs for the Guildford Four. They, too, were unlikely suspects: Paddy and Annie Maguire were members of the local Conservative club and vocal supporters of the British monarchy. Their two sons, 15-year-old Vincent and 13-year-old Patrick, were London-born and had no interest in Ireland or its politics. Patrick's ambition, rather ironically, was to become a commando in the British army.

The Guildford Four were convicted on the basis of their confessions and given life sentences. A few months later the Maguire Seven were also found guilty and received a range of jail sentences (young Patrick picked up four years) for handling and manufacturing explosives. "The courts," wrote author Robert Kee, who has reported extensively on the case, "were responsible for a miscarriage of justice on a scale unprecedented in Britain in this century."

Late last spring, as the cameras rolled, the British press rose up again in defense of the judicial system and the police, this time in response to the acquittal of three police officers accused of tampering with evidence in the Guildford Four case. Detectives John Donaldson, Thomas Style, and Vernon Attwell had been branded liars by an appeals-court judge when the Four were acquitted in 1989, and accused of fabricating the confession taken from Paddy Armstrong.

Several newspapers claimed, quite wrongly, that the acquittal of the police officers could mean that the Guildford Four should not have been released. "[It] suggests," said The Daily Telegraph, "there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that two of the Guildford Four, Mr. Patrick Armstrong and Mr. Gerry Conlon, might have been guilty after all." The Daily Express wondered whether the "progressive glitterati" making the Guildford Four film would make a sequel "to mark the victory against injustice won by the three acquitted police officers. But somehow we doubt it." The Times, the once faultless Thunderer, had the discourtesy to describe the director as "Peter" Sheridan before implying he was merely jumping on the Guildford Four commercial bandwagon with the rest of the bleeding hearts.

From a strict legal standpoint, the acquittal of the policemen has done little to undermine the Four's claims. Their supporters point out that the charge that the detectives had concocted evidence was a small part of their claims to innocence. But Conlon and Armstrong remain bitter about the way the trial was handled and what they feel constitutes a retrial in the pages of the English press.

Jim Sheridan throws the morning press aside in irritation. "Reading these papers," he says, "makes me feel that there's a propaganda war being fought. You can see it has nothing to do with justice, it's to do with politics." He erupts at the implication beneath all the stories: that his film glorifies I.R.A. violence. "Anyone who has read the script would know that is not true. The film is saying violence does not work."

"An officer said that if I didn't make a statement I would never see my mother or sister again," recalls Gerry Conlon.

Sheridan is thinking of bringing legal action against several newspapers which suggested some months ago that the filmmakers would have to rewrite the script in the wake of the detectives' acquittals. "In a way, I'm not sorry the police officers were acquitted," he says, "except that it casts doubts on the innocence of the Guildford Four. But who wants three [relatively] lowranking officers to be held responsible for something that obviously went much higher?"

The crucial point in all this is that for more than 15 years, since the time of the original sentencing, evidence pointing to the Guildford Four's innocence has been in the hands of the English authorities. A witness corroborating Conlon's alibi that he was asleep in a North London men's hostel at the time of the bombings had given a statement to police. This statement had been turned over to the Crown barristers, who chose to ignore it and who failed to pass the name of the witness on to his defense counsel, which was legally required. Furthermore, two I.R.A. men captured around the time of the Guildford Four trial confessed to the bombings and told authorities that they had the wrong people in jail. This was perceived by British authorities as a case of the I.R.A. protecting its own.

"The problem is the reluctance to confront the issues. To say the system' doesn't need an overhaul when it patently does is crazy," Sheridan says. "The English judicial system was the foundation of the modem world's judicial system, so it has great value and deserves great respect. But it needs to reappraise itself."

At the heart of the problem is the Irish dilemma. He says it's a blight on Ireland "for the Irish people to be called bombers . . . and mad . . . and terrorists.

"It's not that the atrocities won't win for one side or the other—they could well. But the price paid isn't worth the victory. This is fuckin' Western Europe at the end of the 20th century—we should be capable of solving this without dynamite, internment camps, and soldiers on the street."

Sheridan is right. A propaganda war is being fought. The English establishment is under siege, its central institutions in disarray. The monarchy is a calamity; the Conservative government under Thatcher's dithering successor, John Major, is driving the country to the wall. And now, as "the Troubles" again reach crisis point, one of the pillars of British democracy—the judicial system—stands tainted.

Sheridan says the newest upswing in the bombing and killing has no impact on his film. "I don't think it makes any difference," he says. "There have been upsurges of violence for the past 20 years. It , won't affect our plans to open. . . . What this film is saying is that violence doesn't achieve anything."

But the recent violence has certainly made the movie a more marketable, commercial property.

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In the soft drizzle of a Liverpool spring morning, Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Gerry Conlon in Sheridan's film, is preparing for a climactic scene. He prowls around at the top of the courthouse steps as Sheridan makes final adjustments to the crowd of hundreds of extras who will cheer Conlon's acquittal. Day-Lewis is as thin as a rail, and pale. His eyes have the intense look of someone who has emerged from a desperate gloom.

Sheridan shouts "Action." Day-Lewis strides down the steps, fists held aloft, and then crosses the street to the cheering, placard-waving crowd. There he delivers his defiant message: "I am an innocent man. I spent 15 years in prison for something I didn't do. I watched my father die in prison for something he didn't do. He was a great man, an honest man. Until my father and all the people involved in this case are proved innocent and the guilty ones brought to justice I will fight on ... in the name of my father and the truth." Cut.

As Day-Lewis relaxes, two pretty young extras lean out of the crowd and grab him by the sleeve. They look concerned, and there is a plaintive edge to their voices. "Are you all right? What's happened to you? You were so handsome in Last of the Mohicans."

They were paying him a great compliment, of course. To transform himself from the Mohican hunk to an undemourished small-time crook from Belfast, DayLewis has lost around 30 pounds, lived off an awful prison diet of cold porridge and unidentifiable slops, and has been interrogated by teams of Irish police. While his co-star and fellow Oscar winner, Emma Thompson, chats and jokes with crew and extras during the breaks, DayLewis alternately broods and ruminates in some distant comer, far from the perpetual motion that is modem moviemaking. For the past three months he has spoken only in the West Belfast accent of his character.

Jim Sheridan's first film since The Field is based on Conlon's book, Proved Innocent, and weaves the Kafkaesque story of this extended Irish family's ordeal in with the relationship between Gerry and his sickly father, Guiseppe, who died in prison in 1980. After My Left Foot, which was about a good mother, Sheridan says, he went looking for a story about a good father "and the only one I could find was Joyce's Leo Bloom, and they're not going to make a film about Ulysses." Then Terry George, an Irish friend in New York, sent him a treatment for a screenplay of the Conlon story. At the center of this tale of injustice Sheridan found what he was looking for.

Sheridan says the British government went to war against this family. "Don't forget that we're dealing here with a family—a father and a son, aunt and uncle, and the two nephews. The British establishment decided that this was your terrorist family from Northern Ireland, that this was your bombing family. They demonized Irish people, and this story exposes a racial attitude . . . and that racial attitude is at the basis of the conflict in Northern Ireland."

The story begins with the teenage Conlon as a petty thief and general lollygagger in Belfast's Lower Falls Road area. After several run-ins with the local I.R.A. "community policemen" for antisocial behavior in the summer of 1974, he decided to escape the depressing violence of Belfast and try his luck in the bright lights of London. He soon fell in with the local Irish community and the platform-shoed hippie squatters who swarmed through North London at the time.

In October 1974 the I.R.A. blew up the Horse and Groom and the Seven Stars pubs in suburban Guildford, killing 5 people and seriously injuring another 70.

Weeks later, two other deaths occurred at a bombing of a Woolwich pub. So began the most intense terror campaign in I.R.A. history. In nearly 50 bombing and shooting attacks, more than 30 people were killed, hundreds more disfigured, and millions of pounds' worth of property destroyed. But even after the arrest of the Guildford Four, the bombings and shootings continued—well into the following year, in fact.

In July 1975, while the Four were awaiting trial, Scotland Yard had a major success and captured members of the I.R.A.'s Northern A.S.U. Among them was Brendan Dowd, a known I.R.A. hard-liner, who was soon to confess to having been involved in the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. A few months later, just a few weeks after the Four's trial, another major police coup led to the capture of the London-based A.S.U.

Like Dowd, the London group's leader, Joe O'Connell, admitted involvement in the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. Both men offered details only the real bombers would have known. O'Connell, in a statement from the dock before being handed 12 concurrent life sentences, said that he and his fellow accused had instructed their lawyers "to draw the attention of the court to the fact that four totally innocent people are serving massive sentences for three bombings. We, and another man [Dowd] now sentenced, have admitted our part in the Woolwich bombing. The director of public prosecutions was made aware of these submissions and has chosen to do nothing."

The judiciary's indifference went far deeper than that. Even before the Four's trial, in September 1975, there was forensic evidence that the Guildford and Woolwich bombs were identical to those used in attacks after the Four were arrested.

On October 22, 1975, the Four were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge, Sir John Donaldson, said he regretted they had not been charged with treason, for then he could have sentenced them to death. They were convicted entirely on the basis of the wildly contradictory confessions they had made in the first week of detention. There were more than 100 discrepancies in their signed statements. For example, the Four disagreed on who planted which bombs, on who drove which cars, and on where the explosives had been stored. But the fact that the confessions had been made was enough for the jury.

What the jury didn't understand was how innocent people behave when confronted with such diabolical misjudgment and misfortune. Totally bewildered by their arrests, the beatings, and the threats to their families, the Four say they believed the only way to stop the torment was to confess. Conlon and Armstrong, according to police, actually confessed twice. Conlon hoped to make things easier for his sick father. They were all convinced that the truth would come out and the confessions would mean nothing. Carole Richardson said that the statements she wrote "were virtually dictated to me and I wrote down what they said. ... I was forced to go along with what was happening because I was terrified of them and of what further treatment I would get if I continued to deny my involvement.''

The judge regretted the Four had not been charged with treason, for then he could have sentenced them to death.

"Can you imagine what it was like?'' says Sheridan. "I don't want to impose my semi-intellectual ideas on the Four, but it is a fact of Irish life that we like to talk, and when you've been deprived of power, words are your only possession. Our English is Joycean—hyperbole, all over the place, big story worlds and crazy storytelling. This is the crazy storytelling of four kids. It's literature in a police station.''

We are sitting in an Indonesian restaurant in Liverpool's Albert Dock, and we have had a bottle of California Merlot and Jim Sheridan is getting into his stride. He is cherubic, boyish-looking despite graying hair, perhaps because of his oversize trousers and turquoiseish jacket with too long sleeves that flop over the ends of his fingers. Sheridan is genuinely outraged that there is still debate over the innocence of the accused. "As far as the English authorities were concerned, this mother [Annie Maguire] would allow her children to use nitroglycerin, to knead it with their hands. Anyone who thinks about it for a second knows it is total nonsense."

Sheridan's obsession with the ConIons' father-son relationship has its roots in his own life. Sheridan's father was a hugely important figure to him, a man who took him out to the theater and filled him with literary ideas through his teenage years. Daniel Day-Lewis also has powerful memories of his father, Britain's former poet laureate Cecil DayLewis, who died in 1972, when young Daniel was a bit of a misfit. "It is a great source of sadness," he has said, "that my father died before he saw me do anything worthwhile."

Guiseppe Conlon's relationship with his son, Gerry, is typically fraught and argumentative—until Gerry is arrested. Then the father travels to England to sort the business out and finds himself arrested, convicted a year later of possession of explosives, and sentenced to 12 years in jail. It is here that Gerry begins to recognize his father's great strengths, and they forge a relationship that sustains both men. "The story starts with a confessional," says Sheridan, "which is Catholic, and ends with the individual assertion ... of Guiseppe, of innocence. The journey from the confessional to the appraisal of self."

For all that, it is still the true story of British authority heaping unimaginable misery on an Irish family that will provide the controversy that is sure to greet the film's release. Sheridan says that his two stars—"the two most established young actors in Britain"—are brave to have taken the roles, and he expects everyone to get more flak before it's all over.

As we leave the restaurant, I remember how a few years ago Sheridan described to me what it was like being an Irishman in London. He spoke of how the overwhelming class consciousness of the English establishment automatically reduced an Irishman—even one as serenely amiable and devastatingly clever as Jim Sheridan—to a subspecies. It wasn't said with bitterness, just delivered in a matter-of-fact manner, touched with a mild incredulity. I kept worrying about it, wondering whether this was more of the Joycean hyperbole. As we walk out across Albert Dock this night I realize that he was not exaggerating.

Emma Thompson points out that she accepted the part of Gareth Peirce before she won the Oscar. But she would have done it anyway. She laughs off the tabloid label of Young Vanessa Redgrave, but she is politically aware and active enough to be quite well versed in the swirling drama that is the Irish Troubles.

She has no doubt that all 11 were innocent. She has spent time with Gareth Peirce, Gerry Conlon, and Paddy Armstrong and says that through meeting them and reading the four books published on the subject "I have got to know more about the way the judiciary dealt with Irish terrorist offenses in that period. And that somehow, in this case, the judicial system broke down . . . because of the violence and atrocities that went with those bombings . . . such fucking pointless violence."

The recent bombings and violence have led to renewed public outrage at I.R.A. terrorism. "So," she says, "anyone raising the question of civilrights abuses in this climate is bound to come up against public opinion—and public opinion that is in many ways shaped by an hysterical press." So hysterical that one newspaper even introduced a royal slight into the Emma-

bashing, accusing her of flying in the face of convention when, at a London premiere, "she spoke to Princess Margaret before being spoken to."

Back in London I arrange to meet the real Gareth Peirce, but first I take a drive around the City of London. On April 24, a dump truck filled with more than a ton of fertilizer explosives devastated an entire block of buildings. The medieval Saint Ethelburga's church was flattened, and several office buildings may yet have to be pulled down. It is eerie passing through these bombedout buildings, these shattered shrines to Mammon, and a strange calm attends the leveled buildings. It happened on a Saturday, when the City was deserted, and only one person, a photojournalist, was killed.

In her small cluttered law office above the vegetable market in Camden Town, the real Gareth Peirce is not entirely pleased with the glare of publicity Jim Sheridan's film has brought. While she has happily advised the filmmakers about the story and has spent some time with her celluloid alter ego, Emma Thompson, she worries that all of the hubbub may interfere with her work. At the time of my visit, she was defending a young Irishman charged with hijacking a taxi and sending a bomb to Downing Street, the home of the prime minister. The young man is a university graduate with no previous convictions and an impeccable character; he is also five feet two inches tall, while the suspect is supposed to be five feet seven inches. "It is blindingly obvious," says Peirce quietly, "that he is innocent. Ironically, he was asleep in bed at the time of the incident, just like Gerry.''

The charges were eventually dropped. But the Guildford and Maguire episodes won't go away—despite partial cash settlements (to three of the Guildford Four only) and the hopes of the British judiciary. Judge Sir William Macpherson stated after the acquittal of the three policemen, "It seems to me . . . the public and certainly those involved on the legal side could not wish to gaze at the entrails of this case further." He is wrong. A former appeals-court judge, Sir John May, is currently conducting a judicial inquiry into the cases, and his report is expected by the time Jim Sheridan's film is released in the U.S. At the time of this writing, no one stands charged with the bombings in Guildford and Woolwich.