They made him the rebel he became – the irony of Gerry Conlon's embattled life. At 20 he went to England to seek work and to escape the grimness, everyday violence and politics of the Lower Falls and the "minor delinquency" that, as his lawyer Gareth Peirce would put it, was his life . He lived in London as a dropout. But if he wasn't then interested in the war, the war machine was to become interested in him and his family, expendable Irish who would do as scapegoats for 1974 IRA pub bombings, with which they had nothing to do. Who would care as long as someone paid?
Indeed, they paid: Gerry Conlon and his three flatmates spent 15 years jail, his father Giuseppe, would die in jail, and an aunt, uncle, cousins and a family friend spent 12 years in jail. But a fire was lit in Conlon, a towering rage, that drove him, and also sustained him in the repeated solitary that wilful disobedience brought in jail and would too later in life – through drink, drugs and the breakdowns that almost consumed him. "He clamoured and shouted and wrote and . . . telephoned and besieged the great and the good until gradually there was movement, by the slowest of degrees," the indefatigable Peirce would write of his jail campaign. "The release when it came [in 1989], came with the sudden falling of the citadel; all of the evidence had been fabricated. Everyone had been wrong and he had been right."
In 1975, in sentencing the Guildford Four, Mr Justice Donaldson told them: "If hanging were still an option you would have been executed." It was the shadow of those gallows that drove Conlon, for whom campaigning selflessly for others wrongly accused – and first, successfully, the Birmingham Six – became the raison d'être of his remaining years.
In recent times it was the treatment of the new pariahs, new easy scapegoats, Muslims and dissident republicans, which exercised him. His uncomfortable warnings, salutary reminders to those few who would listen, of what he saw as history repeating itself.