The first thing to be said about the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven is that their case was a shocking indictment of British justice; and the second is that ultimately it was a vindication of the British sense of fair play. Because it was an extraordinary cultural attachment to that very British concept which ultimately saw the innocent made free.
These are but flickering lights in a dark vault of cynicism, and studied falsehood, as Patrick Victory's recently published Justice and Truth (Sinclair-Stevenson) reveals. Yet the institutional cynicism involved in the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven is as nothing compared to the wickedness which brought about those far graver miscarriages of justice: of the Birmingham Twenty-One, the Guildford Seven and the Woolwich Two.
And there is this to be said also: that those who framed the Guildford Four, the Maguire family or the Birmingham Six were never cheered to the roofbeams by their colleagues. But that is how the Sinn Féin-IRA family greeted the butchers of Guildford and Woolwich on their early release.
That said, a shocking crime was done to the Maguire family and the Guildford Four, who were all framed for crimes of which they were totally innocent. And the British Home Office was responsible for derelictions of duty that themselves constitute unpunished crime. The thoroughly guilty set up and punished the wholly innocent.
The Home Office actually said: "There was no scientific evidence to link the Balcombe Street gang with the Guildford and Woolwich bombings." But, as Patrick Victory points out, there was compelling evidence from British government scientists at the RARDE establishment to link the Balcombe Street gang with those bombings, which the scientists themselves suppressed. Other evidence was manipulated or even deleted, and on the instructions of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the police.
Several different police forces then connived not merely in the conviction of innocent people, but effectively in the protection from justice of the guilty, by refusing to investigate the claims by the Balcombe Street gang that they were responsible for the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. Moreover, the police also had to ignore their own discovery of bomb-making materials in IRA safe-houses in order to pursue their case against the Maguires.
Even now, all these years later, the scale of the conspiracy, involving so many people at so many levels of British life, is almost beyond rational explanation. That conspiracy survived the cogent and articulate claim of responsibility for the Guildford and Woolwich bombings by Joseph O'Connell of the Balcombe Street IRA gang at the appeal of the Guildford Four. And the glue to this conspiracy was that those who belonged to it preferred the egregious confabulations of falsehood to the infinitely simpler, and perfectly accessible truth.
Minor error
So we get the Court of Appeal pouncing with glee on a vital "discrepancy" about the location of a meeting of four members of the IRA London unit. Brendan Dowd said it was in Knightsbridge: the others said it was in Sloane Square. This is a minor error; the equivalent in Dublin of getting South George's Street confused with Wexford Street. But Dowd's other information about the pub was that it was 30 yards from a tube station: indeed it was - the very pub as described by other members of his gang.
Lord Roskill felt able to describe Dowd as a deplorable witness because of such minor inconsistencies, which were, in fact, miniscule compared to the spectacular 153 inconsistencies in the "confessions" of the Guildford Four. When we have such a wilful denial of reality in the face of such an overwhelming body of evidence, and when we find obdurate certainty where at the very least there should have been enormous doubt, we are no longer in the realm of jurisprudence but of psychiatric morbidity.
And with the passage of the years, it is possible now to reflect on how the two legal systems of Britain and Ireland responded to the rising wave of terrorist outrage. Simply, one can say that for a while anyway, the former went to a great deal of trouble to convict the flagrantly innocent; and the latter, right throughout the purgatory of the Troubles, went to nearly as much trouble to acquit the flagrantly guilty.
So in both jurisdictions, the courts failed the public weal. But at least in Britain, a rising groundswell of public opinion, led by Cardinal Basil Hume, served in time to undo some of the deeds of their delinquent courts and police. Innocent people finally were released. But there was no such groundswell in Ireland at the failures of the courts to deal with terrorism. And innocent people continued to die, and die for ever, beyond all power of any court of appeal, at the hands of terrorists who had been liberated by our courts, often because of an uncrossed "t" or undotted "i".
Such diseased casuistry should have prompted searching questions about the culture and the priorities of our courts. No such questions were publicly raised within the profession, and few enough outside it. There simply wasn't the political or the legal will to close the IRA down. Wasn't then and isn't now.
Will is what makes men free. Patrick Victory is the embodiment of such will. He was prominent in the campaign to free the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, and he won a Military Cross fighting for freedom in the last world war. He is now in his eighties. This profoundly moral, magisterially detailed work is his first book. He will write none finer.