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Better late than never
Sorry. It’s not that difficult a sentiment to express, really.
So it should be a source of some bewilderment that it has taken the British authorities more than a decade to apologise to the Conlon and Maguire families for their wrongful imprisonment over the Guildford and Woolwich bombings.
The cases of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven — along with that of the Birmingham Six — are some of the most shameful episodes in the annals of British justice.
In all 17 innocent men and women were wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit at a time when there was a concerted campaign of vilification against much of the Irish community in Britain.
Large swathes of the British media were demanding the police find the perpetrators of a series of IRA bombings in England and these 17 became the unwitting scapegoats.
One — Giuseppe Conlon — never lived to see his name cleared at the Court of Appeal.
He died 25 years ago last month in Hammersmith Hospital of complications relating to a respiratory illness after five years in prison. Even in death he was vilified with British Airways refusing to carry his coffin home to Belfast for his burial.
He had ended up in prison after travelling to London to find a solicitor for his son who had been convicted for the Guildford Four bombings.
He was an ex-Marine with no history of association with terrorist organisations. But in one of the most scandalous verdicts ever handed down in a British court he was pronounced guilty of having been involved in a bomb plot.
We now know that all he was actually guilty of was of being Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
It will be an everlasting shame on the British courts that this innocent man went to his grave without being exonerated.
It is perhaps even more shameful that we have had to wait so long for the authorities to finally issue the apology so deserved by the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven — and that nothing similar has been offered to the Birmingham Six.
But, perhaps, better late than never. Gerry Conlon has spoken movingly of the relief Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public apology to his family has brought.
As he says: “We all feel an incredible sense of justice that at last a British Prime Minister has apologised.
“Everyone has been affected by this. Everyone has suffered trauma from it.
“The good thing is that Tony Blair has acknowledged it.”
Let us hope that something else comes from this apology too. It may be too much to expect that there will never be another miscarriage of justice, that no other innocent men and women will be incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.
But perhaps after Mr Blair’s unprecedented words of regret there will be a greater willingness on the part of the judiciary and authorities to acknowledge when wrongs have been done and a greater commitment to put them right. We can but hope.
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