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IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER (1993)

2020-06-11 admin HISTORY MYSTERIES 0

It is Saturday evening in England. Young people get together and go to a pub.

A short time later, five of them die, and 65 get injured.

It happened on October 5th, 1974, when the IRA exploded bombs in two pubs in Guildford, Surrey.

But tragic as this event is, it is not the end of the story, because innocent people were arrested, tortured, and sent to prison for life. The terrorists who had planted the bombs, later confessed to the crime, but this information was concealed by the security services.

After 15 years in prison, the wrongly accused Guildford four were freed. Instrumental in their release was an English lawyer, a woman, who left no stone unturned in her quest for the truth.

Gerry Conlon, one of the four, wrote a book about the events and became the main character in the movie IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER (1993).

Here is an episode from the film.

Hello, hello.
Good. I never said “thank
you” for taking up our case.
Never thought I’d trust an
English person again…
especially a lawyer.
Anyhow, I’ll be as brief and accurate as I can
with names, dates and places…
anything that might
help in our defence.
To explain how I happened
to be in England in 1974…
at the time of the bombing…
I’d better take you back to Northern
Ireland, where I come from.
See, Belfast in the early
’70s was total chaos.
It was strange to see
soldiers on the street…
all of them terrified of
the civilian population…
any one of whom could
be an IRA gunman.
I was just a petty thief…
stealing scrap metal.
In Belfast, that was a
dangerous occupation.