New show puts quiet man Paddy in spotlight

A man’s life laid bare,” is how actor Don Wycherley describes the critically acclaimed one-man show Paddy – The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong, which comes to the city’s Town Hall Theatre next Thursday, January 30.

Well-known for his work on stage and screen, Don takes on the role of Paddy Armstrong in this show, capturing key moments in the life of a man, who, in 1975, with three other innocent people, was wrongly sentenced to life in prison in England for the 1974 Guildford bombings.

The IRA had planted bombs in two pubs in the Surrey town which killed five people and injured dozens more. There was pressure on the English police to make arrests, which they did – rounding up innocent people and forcing false confessions from them. As with the Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven, the English justice system persevered with torturing, prosecuting and convicting the Guildford Four, even as severe doubts emerged as to their guilt and their treatment in custody.

Mary-Elaine Tynan who was the driving force behind this theatre show and who co-wrote it with Don and Fair City scriptwriter Niamh Gleeson, says an alternative name for the play and the memoir that inspired it could have been ‘The Quiet Man’.

Mary-Elaine, who wrote Paddy’s memoir Life after Life with him, feels it would have been an appropriate title, because, following his release from prison at the age of 39, following 15 years’ incarceration  . . . “Paddy put his head down and got on with his life”.

The Guildford Four – Paddy, along with Paul Hill, Carole Richardson and Gerry Conlon –  were finally freed in 1989 when, after years of campaigning, the Court of Appeal in London ruled their convictions were unsafe and quashed the case, acknowledging that ‘the police must have lied’.

In the years that followed, Paul Hill and Gerry Conlon were vocal about what had been done to them, with both writing books on their experiences. Carole Richardson stayed out of the limelight and later died of cancer in 2013, at the age of 55. She had been just 17 and had been Paddy’s girlfriend when she’d been arrested and convicted.

Conlon, whose father Giuseppe had died in prison being convicted in relation to the same bombings, had blamed himself for what happened his father. He never really got over what had happened, Mary-Elaine observes of the man whose memoir, Proved Innocent, inspired Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film, In the Name of the Father. He died in 2014.

Paddy Armstrong, meanwhile, lived quietly after being released and, following a few tough years, settled in Dublin where he met his wife Caroline and where they reared their two children.

Documentary-maker and author Mary-Elaine felt his voice also needed to be heard and that’s what happened in 2014 when she made an RTÉ Doc on One about him. From that, the book Life after Life came about.

“He was a person who suffered a miscarriage of justice and who wasn’t an orator. I feel it’s really important to represent the silent victims,” she says. “Otherwise, people might think that anyone who suffers a miscarriage of justice is able to represent themselves.”

Pictured: Don Wycherley in Paddy –  The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong.