No Stone Unturned reporters need our support, writes Ronan Brady


A battle journalism has to win B


ritish journalists arrested on trumped-up charges after exposing police collusion with a racist murder gang? Surely there would be outrage in the Cabinet and an angry phone call from the foreign secretary to the


government concerned? Sadly, if this had happened in the case of Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney, the British government would have been phoning itself to complain. These two Belfast journalists revealed evidence showing police complicity with a sectarian murder spree in 1994. But the collusion did not end there. When McCaffrey and Birney conclusively proved the identities of the killers, they gave the police six months’ notice that they were going to name them in a documentary. The police did nothing to warn the killers until the very day the documentary premièred. Then the two journalists were arrested under the Official


Secrets Act. The authorities alleged McCaffrey and Birney had stolen the leaked material and that had endangered the lives of the killers by naming them – even though the police could have injuncted the programme if they genuinely feared loss of life.


The documentary No Stone Unturned is a meticulous exposure of the 1994 police ‘investigation’ into a massacre in a rural bar during a football match. It has appeared at a pivotal moment. Recently, more and more evidence has surfaced of Britain’s role in the dirty war – cooperation between the police, the military and Loyalist terror gangs during the Troubles. Birney believes he and his colleague were arrested to discourage such scrutiny: “That was all designed to send a chill factor to our colleagues and our friends and to the wider journalistic community: don’t mess with the past in Northern Ireland.” McCaffrey warns “if we lose this case, we won’t be the last. It sets a benchmark for what the police can do to other journalists.” The massacre at the Heights bar in Loughinisland, County


Down, was truly savage. An Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gunman entered the pub during a World Cup football match between the Republic of Ireland and Italy on June 18 1994. He sprayed the crowd from behind, killing six and seriously wounding five others, leaving blood, beer and broken glass everywhere. Then he made his getaway. The victims’ relatives were promised justice would be swift and thorough. In patrician tones, Northern Ireland secretary


10 | theJournalist


A guide to the acronyms


PONI (Police Ombudsman For Northern Ireland): the independent statutory body for complaints against the police service. It was set up in 2000 as a result of the peace process. There have been three police ombudsmen.


PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland): the police service since 2001. In 2001, all serving members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary were transferred to the PSNI.


Initially, trainees were recruited on a 50:50 Catholic: Protestant basis but this system was abolished a decade later. Catholics now make up 20 per cent of the membership and the PSNI is on a drive to increase that.


RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary): the police force of Northern Ireland from 1922 until 2001. Frequently accused of bias against the Nationalist community, it was replaced by the PSNI. The first PONI


Patrick Mayhew addressed the killers: “You are going to be caught, sooner or later. The RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] never give up.” The senior investigating officer told Claire Rogan, the wife of one of the victims, that the RUC would leave “no stone unturned till we get the perpetrators of this”. McCaffrey was a local journalist at the time and it is the


aftermath that really occupies the documentary he made with Birney and Alex Gibney, a US journalist. Because, as Rogan says on film: “I don’t think they ever lifted a stone, never mind turned it.” No Stone Unturned exposes the extraordinarily botched police investigation. The RUC was given the getaway car – normally, such evidence would have been burned. Then the Czech murder weapon was found in a field nearby. There was a holdall with gloves, handguns and balaclava masks. Some arrests followed but the suspects were released. Then came the IRA and the Loyalist ceasefires. Suddenly, in


McCaffrey’s words: “Loughinisland became something that you didn’t talk about.” Rogan explains that “time went on and we chose to stay quiet, because that was our nature”. Ten years after the atrocity, that changed and the silent


found that there were incidents of collusion between the RUC and the Ulster Volunteer Force in the killing of a young Loyalist and that there was no reason to believe these were isolated.


UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force): a sectarian terror group responsible for around 500 deaths. Although its stated aim was to counter Republican violence and to ‘maintain the Union’, most of its victims have been civilian Catholics, chosen at random. The massacre at the Heights bar in Loughinisland was conducted by Ronnie Hawthorn on behalf of the UVF.


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