Four Irish people — the Guildford Four — were wrongly convicted in 1975 of the 1974 Guildford pub bombings in Surrey, England, which killed five people, on the basis of confessions that were extracted under duress and subsequently shown to be false. Their convictions were quashed in 1989 after Surrey Police detectives were found to have fabricated evidence and suppressed exculpatory material. The case was one of the most significant British miscarriages of justice of the twentieth century, closely linked to the Birmingham Six case.

The Guildford Four case, like the Birmingham Six, generated substantial Irish and British literary response. Terry George's film In the Name of the Father (1993) brought the case to international attention. For Irish poets — including Seamus Heaney, whose poetry grappled constantly with questions of evidence, testimony, and justice in the context of the Troubles — such cases of fabricated evidence against Irish people in English courts provided a charged literary and political context for writing about guilt, proof, and state violence.