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Both:
Hello. Welcome to Irish passport. Let’s do it. Welcome to the Irish passport. I’m Tim McInerney. I’m Naomi O’Leary. We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi? Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK.
Over 90 percent of the killings during the Troubles were at the hands of terrorists. Every single one of those was a crime. The, the fewer than 10 percent that were at the hands of the military and police were not crimes. They were people acting under orders and under instruction and fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way.
Hello listeners and welcome back to the Irish passport podcast.
Tim:
Hi everyone. Today we’ll be looking at a different sort of history; a history of events that some people would like very much that we just forgot. Events which not only continue to haunt the present but may have huge consequences for decades to come.
When people talk about the unresolved parts of Northern Ireland’s peace process, three things are usually mentioned flags, parades and dealing with the past. This episode will be the first in a two part series dedicated to that last and most nebulous question- the past. The consequences it continues to bear over people’s lives and the routes that people have in dealing with it. Searching for the truth and attempting to find justice, as well as the personal ways people can have of coming to terms with the past.
Tim:
The sounds you heard at the beginning of the episode were a loyalist flute band at a pro Brexit march in London. And of course you also heard the voice of Karen Bradley who is the current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. She was responding to a question in Parliament and her statement made headlines across the UK and Ireland. Not just because of what she was saying but the context in which it was expressed. Her words came just as the families of those killed in the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972 were waiting to hear whether the British Army suspects would be prosecuted or not. As we discussed in the previous series , Bloody Sunday saw 28 unarmed civilians shot by the British army, 14 of whom died and many of whom were shot in the back or the face. Karen Bradley was later forced to apologize but her sentiments have since been echoed by a series of colleagues in the Conservative Party.
Brexit and the polarization of politics have reintroduced Northern Ireland as an overt issue for British nationalists in a way that it hasn’t been in maybe decades. What you heard at the beginning of the episode were the sounds of a political backlash that is underway to counter attempts to excavate the past that are just starting to bear fruit. For example an inquest has begun into the shooting of unarmed civilians by British soldiers in the Ballymurphy massacre and one of the soldiers involved in bloody Sunday, Soldier F, is facing prosecution.
Tim:
Of course it has now been over 20 years since the Good Friday agreement largely brought a halt to those decades of violence in Northern Ireland and it did that in many ways. It allowed people in Northern Ireland to choose their citizenship- British, Irish or both. It established a system of power sharing between nationalist and unionist parties in the Northern Ireland Assembly and it allowed for the opening up of the border. It also oversaw the establishment of a range of inter community and cross-border initiatives big and small, which helped build new bridges across communities after generations of segregation.
But the past has not been dealt with. There is no agreement on how or whether it should be, and attempts to do so remain politically contentious and divided. To give an idea of the scale of what we’re talking about, it’s estimated that there are 3000 unsolved murders dating from the conflict. According to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, about 500 500000 people there have suffered bereavement physical injury or trauma. That’s more than a quarter of the entire population.
Tim:
And the conflict itself is not a closed book. It continues to extract a price from a younger generation who were children or maybe not even born when the peace deal was reached. More recently the 29 year old journalist Lyra McKee was added to the list of the dead, shot dead by the new IRA in April during a riot in Derry.
Lyra was a rising star. She wrote about the so-called peace babies and how that young generation never saw the full benefits of peace that were promised. Her article about intergenerational trauma which was called Suicide of the Peace Babies in Mosaic magazine inspired what will be the second part of this two part episode. I’d actually hoped to interview Lyra for it but that conversation will never now happen. We’d like to express our deepest sympathies to her family and friends and we dedicate these episodes to her memory.
Tim:
It’s perhaps approrpriate that this episode focuses on journalists and the price they can pay for their work. In particular we are looking at the issue of collusion today and the consequences faced by those who try to bring it to light.
Collusion refers to the accusations that elements in the police and state forces in Northern Ireland essentially got involved in the conflict slipping information to this person or that, turning a blind eye when it served their purposes, working with informers within paramilitary organisations, and perhaps protecting them even as they took part in killings.
Tim:
To explore the issue of collusion further, we’re going to look at one particularly violent incident that has become a touchstone case for collusion and the secrecy which continues to surround it. The Loughinisland murders of 1994. We’ll be looking at how a recent documentary about that event, No Stone Unturned, has raised questions about just how far up collusion might go.
Slaughter in Loughinisland as loyalist terrorists shoot eleven people in the back as they watch the World Cup on television.
I just remember Mummy saying to us that bad man had to come into the pub and they’d shot six people and Daddy was dead.
The getaway car was discovered the morning after the attack.
There was just a sense that something wasn’t right.
Somebody somewhere helped these people cover this up.
We were thwarted all the time. Every question we asked. We were told we can’t tell you that, that’s national security.
They were absolutely ruthless.
Loughinisland is a tiny village in Northern Ireland. It’s not much more than a handful of houses not far from the town of Downpatrick. It was one of those places in Northern Ireland where it was possible to feel far away from the effect of the Troubles. It was a small, quiet, mostly Catholic community, which was largely removed from the intense conflict that was going on largely in the cities.
Tim:
That was, of course, until the 18th of June 1994. That night, a group of people had gathered in the local pub to watch Ireland play Italy in the World Cup that year. The Heights bar is one of those typical Irish pubs that you often see at crossroads. Really it’s just a front living room that has been turned into a tiny bar where everyone would know everyone and it would almost be like being at a friend’s house more than at a public establishment.
It wasn’t just any night in Ireland. It was electric. Everyone remembers that night. It was a once in a generation team of footballers with talent disproportionate to our nation’s size of just a few million people, and they were storming through the World Cup. The nation was gripped, and on this particular night, Ireland improbably beat Italy the many time World Cup winners who were always a world class team.
I remember spilling out of our house where we lived on a housing estate in Dublin, joining the children of the estate in a spontaneous victory parade. It was a night of hope and joy and a sense that our national team was doing us proud at a time when Ireland was poor and troubled. We all felt united by the experience. So when the news came that a horror had befallen a group of people who had been watching the match along with us it was all the more painful, cruel and horrific.
Tim:
As the people in that little bar in Loughinisland watched the Irish team on a small television behind the bar, two masked gunmen burst in firing assault rifles. They shot 11 men in the back in a rain of bullets. Six of them died. Among them, one of the oldest fatalities of the Troubles, 87 year old Barney Green.
As the news broke about what happened in Loughinisland. the celebrations across the country turned to shock. Even in the terrible context of theTroubles, this murder of innocent people, targeted because of the cultural signifier of watching the Republic of Ireland play in the World Cup, was shocking.
Tim:
The loyalist UVF, or Ulster Volunteer Force, claimed responsibility for the attack within a few hours. The UVF is a pro-British terrorist group that had been around since the 1960s and whose aim was to fight against Irish republicanism in order to maintain Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. This paramilitary group, it might be noted, already had an established history of targeting and killing Catholics at random. In this instance they claimed that an IRA meeting was being held in the Loughinisland pub, which it later became clear was not true.
Condemnation was swift. The attack gathered huge international media attention and was denounced by figures across the world including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, the Pope, and American president Bill Clinton. The then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Patrick Mayhew visited the scene and promised that those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice and be locked up. But what actually happened was very different indeed.
Tim:
As the families of the Loughinisland victims grieved, it began to become clear that there was something more to this case than met the eye. Evidence was going missing, leads were not being followed up, and a wall of silence had descended on some quarters of the police and defence forces. The British state and police force it seemed knew much more about what had really happened in Loughinisland than they were letting on. And as the days and months went by the likelihood of anyone being brought to justice seemed to evaporate before the eyes of this small community.
In 2017 the Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney released a documentary about the events of the 18th of June 1994. It included shocking material about the failures to investigate the destruction of evidence and indications of outright collusion. One of the reporters behind the documentary was Barry McCaffrey of the investigative journalism site The Detail. The facts he uncovered about Loughinisland not only shocked him to the core, but ended up dragging him and the documentary into a strange and twisted story of injustice and lies, and he’s ended up paying a personal price himself. I interviewed Barry in the Belfast office of The Detail and he told me why unsolved murders continue to cast such a shadow over Northern Ireland.
Twenty five years on from the supposed end of the Troubles, families are still fighting through the courts in many cases for even inquests have never been held. In a lot of these cases, a lot of these murders, the people responsible aren’t willing to to tell the truth, aren’t willing to provide families or loved ones with the answers. Now that can be on the Republican side, whether the IRA or the INLA killed people, they don’t want to give answers; on the loyalist side, the UDA, the UVF and particularly in the case of the state where the state has killed people and you can say, well you know that Republicans have as much, there there is as much of an obligation on them or loyalist paramilitaries as as the state. But for right or wrong the state is held to a higher level. They are the people who who are supposed to be protecting its citizens. They aren’t supposed to be involved in the murder of of of its own citizens
Barry explained that in the case of the Loughinisland massacre, it took a decade before the families of the victims began to understand that the police investigation was simply not going to give them the answers that had been promised.
The documentary centers around the loyalist gun attack on the Heights bar in Loughinisland on June the 18th 1994, when two UVF gunmen burst into the Heights bar while the local people, local men and women, were watching the Republic of Ireland play Italy in the 1994 World Cup football soccer championships in America. Six people were killed. One of the oldest victims of the Troubles Barney Green in, in, in his 80s. All these these men, these people, were totally innocent, totally random. For 20 years, for at least for for 15 years, the Loughinisland families they remained silent. They never spoke in the media. They never did press interviews. They never did television interviews because the police were telling them ‘We are so close to catching these killers. We know who they are. Give us, you know, give us another few days, give us another few weeks, give us another another few months.’ The title of the film comes from a promise that a policeman made one of the victims wives that we, you know, we will leave no stone unturned.
I’ll never forget their words. We will leave no stone unturned. And those words rang in my ear to this day because I don’t think they ever lifted the stone, never mind turned it.
Ten years went by and nobody was brought to justice. Nobody served a day in jail. And after ten years that faith ran out because they started to uncover evidence that the police hadn’t tried to catch the killers. Certainly there were elements of the police who didn’t do their jobs. So in in 2005 the Loughinisland families came together and they approached the police ombudsman.
Tim:
The police ombudsman in Northern Ireland is supposed to be an impartial independent voice who can look into allegations of misconduct in the police force. So he or she is there to police the police, in other words. Officially there is no actual crime called collusion, but if police are claimed to have colluded with terrorist groups then the Northern Ireland ombudsman is obliged to look into that. The first ombudsman to investigate police conduct in the case of Loughinisland was a man named Al Hutchinson. He released a report on the incident in 2011 which found that evidence in the case had indeed been destroyed. Some DNA links to weapons had been corrupted as well. And he also found out that a police informant had been involved in selling the getaway car. One word the report did not use in 2011 however was collusion.
Many of the victims families considered this report yet another whitewash and they campaigned for a new report which was published under the supervision of the new ombudsman a man called Michael Maguire in 2016.
An ombudsman report came out which concluded that there had been collusion, that police hadn’t brought the killers to justice that, there had been evidence that it was destroyed, and that there hadn’t been the kind of proper police investigation that could have brought these killers to justice.
The big question of course is why, and to even begin to understand that we have to consider the context of Northern Ireland at this point.
Tim:
Yes, OK, so let’s look at the years leading up to 1994. Now, since the 1980s there had been a huge escalation in the number of weapons coming into the country. The IRA had received massive shipments of arms, many of which came from Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya because Gaddafi saw that as a way to get at Margaret Thatcher’s government in the UK. With this new capability and with the money that continued to flow in from the IRA sympathizers mostly in the USA, the IRA had been focusing on bringing the conflict to England. Basically, Republicans realized that Westminster just didn’t really care or certainly they didn’t care enough about violence in Northern Ireland. You know it had become at this stage normalised it didn’t even make headlines anymore. But through a series of devastating bombs in England, including the Brighton bomb which targeted Margaret Thatcher, the IRA aimed to put Westminster under a new sort of pressure
And it wasn’t just the British establishment. Loyalist paramilitaries suddenly found themselves massively outgunned by the IRA and they knew they were going to have to wrap things up on their side too. A shipment of weapons destined for loyalists arrived from South Africa in 1988. And even though the police knew that it was coming and when, somehow it was allowed to land and the weapons made it into the country
Tim:
Now, to be clear here, the police at the time in Northern Ireland where the Royal Ulster Constabulary, more usually called the RUC, which was an overwhelmingly Protestant Unionist organisation.
The documentary traces how some factions of the police were undermining efforts to stop those loyalist guns getting into the hands of terrorists. Some in the police force may have seen this as a legitimate tactic, essentially using loyalist gunmen to combat the IRA. So by the early 90s, the Republican and Loyalist were both armed to the teeth. Killings had become a daily occurrence and each one was inevitably followed by reprisals and retribution. Between the bloody tit for tat violence, the conflict itself had come to a kind of stalemate and in the midst of it, all you had the RUC police force and tens of thousands of British Army troops who were charged with keeping law and order. And this of course is where the role of informants becomes important.
Tim:
By the 1990s both sides of the Northern Irish conflict were absolutely riddled with informants. There were whole teams of informants working side by side who didn’t know about each other. Some were managed by the British Army, some were managed by the police and especially the dedicated RUC Special Branch, which worked closely with intelligence corps and MI5. But the system of informants was a bit more complicated than it might have at first seem because it was very often the case that the informants held power over the police and not the other way around.
The best informant was one who was high up in the ranks. So the police handlers would do everything they could to make sure that their informants rose up in importance. In order to rise up the ranks and be above suspicion, informers had to take part in killings. And that meant that informants were necessarily more and more implicated in murders and atrocities. In turn, the state forces who were running those informers were themselves compromised. Did they know about murders in advance and allow them to go ahead? Did they try to influence the course of the conflict to their advantage? According to what the documentary makers discovered this course of events gave informers power over the police. If informants were to blow the whistle on what police had been doing, they could potentially wreak havoc, not just with the police force, but the entire intelligence corps and the British government.
Tim:
A prime example of how complicated this all could get. It was the case of Freddie Scappaticci whose codename was “Stakeknife”. He was also briefly mentioned in the documentary. Within the IRA, Scappaticci was charged with rooting out informers, many of whom ended up dead but Scappaticci was actually an informer himself and he was being used basically to get rid of other informers when it suited his handlers, basically when they had outlived their purpose. In other words he was highly dangerous in what he might say not only about the IRA but also about the British state’s so-called dirty war.
When you step back and look at this situation with these teams of informers and compromised police and security forces, you start to ask; to what extent was the state running this war? That’s one of the questions raised by a bombshell moment in No Stone Unturned, which happens during an interview of a police officer who was involved in the investigation of the Loughinisland massacre. His name was James Binns and according to Binns when police brought in the main suspect in the massacre for questioning, the officer in charge of questioning didn’t focus on trying to get the truth about what happened but instead spent the time sitting in the police station in trying to convince the suspect to commit another murder, to take out someone that the police officer wanted dead. Let’s hear from Barry.
So the police ombudsman report, the final one that came out just a couple of years ago- that found that major evidence had been destroyed. That police had tipped off or some element of the police had tipped off suspects before they were arrested and that clear leads weren’t followed up. So, you know, people that came forward with information, that information was never acted upon. Things like that. What explains that? Why would elements of the police act in such a way?
I suppose that’s one of the big unanswered questions of the Troubles. Dr. McGuire, the police ombudsman, his conclusion was that there was collusion, that elements of the police actively colluded to protect the killers. Our film interviews one a former police officer who had been an investigator on on the murder investigation. He tells how they they brought the main suspect in, the main suspect killer, in to be questioned. Instead of questioning and challenging him and trying to find evidence that that he had carried out this atrocity his colleague instead tried to get this gunman to kill another person and probably for me that was probably one of the most shocking things of the film that this here was a policeman who was willing to go on camera to say well actually sorry my colleague instead of trying to put the killer behind bars, the main suspect behind bars, was trying to entice him to make to commit more murder. You know, these are serious allegations that a whistle blower, in my mind, a brave policeman was prepared to come forward and risk the wrath of his former colleagues. And if if these allegations had been made in Dublin, in London or or wherever, you know, there would be a major investigation, there would be a public inquiry into these allegations. And I think it it says a lot about Northern Ireland and the state of the justice system here that huge damning allegations are made and nobody, even the policeman who’s in charge of Northern Ireland doesn’t even bother to investigate it. I don’t know where else that would happen.
The conduct of the Loughinisland investigation was deeply suspect from the beginning. For example, investigating officers were amazed to find the getaway car shortly after the shooting left totally intact. Normally in these cases, getaway cars would be burned out, but it’s survival made it the biggest piece of physical evidence in the case. Yet before any test could be carried out on it, that car was mysteriously destroyed.
Tim:
No tests were done on the surrounding fields either, even though it was clear that the murderers fled on foot from the car through thick wet farmland that would’ve been highly traceable on their shoes and on their clothes. Later on it also emerged that all original transcripts with the initial suspects had also been destroyed.
And then there were the suspects. Less than 24 hours after the attack, the special branch gave a set of names to the investigating team pinpointing a known U.V.F.. murder gang who they believed were responsible. One of these suspects lived in walking distance from where the getaway car was found. And yet this man was not arrested until a full two months after the shooting. Nor was his house ever searched after the massacre. All those eventually arrested were warned by police beforehand and released shortly afterwards.
Tim:
The McGuire report of 2016 highlighted a litany of this kind of thing including finding ballistic links between the guns used in Loughinisland and the shipment from South Africa that was allowed to reach the hands of loyalist terrorists.
But the plot thickened. Two anonymous letters were sent that would blow the case right open.
Tim:
The first of these letters came in the form of a Valentine’s card. It was sent to a local politician who brought it immediately to the police because that Valentine’s card named a series of people it claimed were responsible for the murders at Loughinisland. That letter along with so much other evidence however mysteriously went missing from police archives. Luckily the councillor who received it had already made a photocopy which has now become one of the most important documents in this case.
In 2011, Barry himself received a second anonymous letter in the post. This letter contained a leaked secret document from 2008, an unredacted document naming three chief suspecst in the case and claiming one of them was a police informer.
Tim:
Now, get this, the Valentine’s Day card , the one that went mysteriously missing, and the documents sent to Barry both named the same people as suspects in the massacre. It was also discovered that the Valentine’s card had been sent by the wife of one of those people who were named
To make sense of all this, Barry went to find the original investigating officer Detective Inspector Albert Carroll. That officer finally admitted he had allowed the woman who sent the Valentine’s card and the husband who she accused to go free with no charge at all on the promise that she would prevent him from killing again and still no one was charged.
Tim:
OK, now we realize that this might be pretty hard to follow and you’re not alone if you’re baffled. The sheer scale of complicity here is, when you put it all together, pretty mind blowing. Remember that even before those leaked documents were taken into account, the 2016 ombudsman’s report had concluded with no hesitation that collusion was a significant factor in the Loughinisland massacre. The documentary team received further confirmation from a source with access to special branch files that one of the murdered gang in this incident was an informant. So could it be that all these diversions and obstacles in the investigation were designed to protect an informant who knew too much, who, if he spoke out, could possibly harm the British state.
Have you come across any evidence that there was straightforwardly any actual support within the police or security services for the acts of, say, loyalist gangs or something like that, was there, was there any straightforward backing of them?
Well yes, yes, sadly the successive police ombudsman investigations and court cases and public inquiries have found that yes, you know, there is ample evidence that the British military intelligence through a shadowy group that had called the Force Research Unit actively helped pick out the targets for loyalist paramilitaries. Now and then obviously armed the paramilitaries not just the force research unit but certainly some elements of the Special Branch then protected the killers not only Loyalist killers but also Republican killers who special branch were protected because they were agents of the state.
So in some way state organizations were orchestrating the violence, they were assisting in arming the groups and they were also in some cases directing the killings and directing the killers. Now they would be doing that because they would perceive it to be in British interests. Is ?that correct. Is this what they describe as the Dirty War?
Yes that’s this, in essence that’s that’s what the Dirty War was. If you look at the public inquiries into the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane and the murder of another solicitor Rosemary Nelson, the judges and the panels and the public inquiries that looked into those murders saw that British military intelligence saw that there was an advantage to arming loyalist paramilitaries and providing them with the names and the intelligence to target not only active Republicans but innocent nationalists some elements of the British military and arguably the police saw this as a tactic in the war against the IRA. People, people’s lives were sacrificed for this thirst for intelligence.
So I was briefed to go down to Belfast and interview several people. What was unusual is that I was told who I could speak to, who I couldn’t speak to, what they would be saying. But just as importantly what they wouldn’t be saying.
Certainly the bigger picture was there was this gang in operation and they were involved in serious criminality.
Obviously there was things going on above my head.
The paper trail will lead to the British government and they cannot allow that to happen.
The police were saying the car was destroyed.
I thought, hold on, the largest physical exhibit in the case and you’ve destroyed it.
Ten years with no information we were kept in the dark.
They knew all along about the dirty war.
You’re taking me into an area that I don’t really want to go to.
I can’t take the risk.
If I can hit somebody early enough and there’s a weak one amongst this team, they might start tumbling.
How come they didn’t do it?
Good question.
I really do believe it goes as far up to the right to the top.
When the documentary first aired in 2017, it made waves across the world.
Tim:
The open naming of the suspects in particular and the exposure of the extent of police collusion was a real shock for a lot of people in Ireland north and south.
And Tim, one year later in 2018, arrests were made but not of the main suspects in the murders. Instead with no warning whatsoever, the new PSNI Police Force Northern Ireland arrested Barry McCaffrey, the investigating journalistas , well as the documentary’s producer Trevor Birney.
Our hope and the hope of the families more importantly was that this new evidence the allegations so the the overwhelming evidence would have compelled or helped the police to to reopen the investigation. But unfortunately that that’s not what happened. On the thirty first of August, 7 a.m. in the morning, Trevor Birney the producer and myself, there was knocks on the doors, there was an armed police man in a boiler suit. He produced a search warrant, said he wanted to come in. The street was was packed with armed boiler suits. They searched my home and at the time I didn’t know but at the same time they were searching Trevors home getting his 8 year old daughter out of bed. His other two daughters are solicitors. They estimate that in all in in both police operations and they they obviously raided our offices here at the same time. We reckoned it was one hundred police officers involved in in the overall operation. We had to undress and wash in front of police officers with cameras. We were then individually arrested, taken to a police station in the centre of Belfast primarily used for terror suspects. We were put into cells. We were eventually given access to our solicitors. We were then questioned for 14 hours and we were held for 14 hours during that time. We were questioned on probably four different occasions. Allocations were put to us that the documents that we used in the film had breached the British state’s official secrets act and that we had put people’s lives at risk by making this film and exposing the collusion on what had gone on. Now, supposedly that the what we didn’t know was the the police press machine had gone into overdrive and it was released to the media nationally and internationally that two men had been arrested for theft, handling stolen goods and breach of the official secrets act and the breach of data protection. But in this press statement what it didn’t say was that six months before the film ever saw the light of day that the production team had gone to police in police headquarters and said, you know, here are the names of the people who we believe are the main suspects in the Loughinisland massacre. We’re telling you now, here’s the names. If you have a problem we’re giving you time to take whatever legal action you need to take or, you know, whatever threat assessment or whatever whatever they needed to do. We we we wanted to act as responsible journalists and film makers and to give police all the time that they needed so that they could do their job so that we we weren’t springing this thing on them. But police didn’t tell people that. Instead of acting on the film which was a year old by this stage instead of you know reinvestigating or arresting in the main suspects they decided to come after us.
Barry and Trevor were released on police bail. It’s worth mentioning that the allegations of theft put against Barry were made in the absence of any of the set documents ever having been reported stolen.
Tim:
Something that Barry pointed out which makes this all the more unsettling is that we’re not talking about the old RUC police force doing this. This was the PSNI and that’s the new police force that was established after the Good Friday Agreement with the idea of, you know, wiping the slate clean and starting afresh. He feels that his and Trevors arrest were a warnings to other journalists, warnings not to probe too deep into state collusion.
We knew we were taking a risk when we were using these documents, but it shouldn’t be about us. It’s about the families. It’s about the not only the Loughinisland families but it’s about every other family who were let down. And it’s about the message that that sends to the families who lost loved ones and who are still seeking the truth.
Do you interpret that as an attempt to silence not just you but those who would also try to bring such issues to light?
Oh yes I think it was very very definitely very deliberately a warning to to other journalists, to anybody else who wants to look at issues, such as collusion or state involvement and murder. Don’t do it because we’re gonna come after you.
Tim:
The response of authorities in arresting the journalists rather than acting on the information they brought to light has caused deep concern about press freedom in the UK. Amnesty International has rallied supporters in support for Barry and for Trevor, and the National Union of Journalists have said the police had violated, I quote, “basic media freedoms.”
Barry and Trevor are still fighting for the return of computers, phones and documents seized by police. They’re still on bail. They can’t travel anywhere without notifying police in advance and they say that police have threatened not to extend their bail if they continue speaking out about the case. Trevor Birnie recently told reporters quote “Police are operating without proper political oversight. I don’t believe this would happen in London. Because it’s Belfast, it seems to be OK.”
Tim:
So Naomi, in light of all this we have no choice but to ask, you know, in whose interest is it that this information would not come to light?
Over the years, Barry McCaffrey the journalist became close to the families of those killed in Loughinisland, and having worked together for so long and shared their stories, their relationship is much more than just journalists and subject. McCaffrey has come to know the extent of their grief. And it matters to him deeply that they get the answers and the justice that they want. Barry told us what he’d like to see come out of this is some kind of resolution for the families, answers about why their fathers and brothers and husbands were shot dead.
What could the police do, or what would be a perfect resolution for us just for the police to do their job, fo the Loughinisland families to be able to say in after 25 years they finally lifted the stone because they promised him 25 years ago that no stone would be unturned. And as Aidan Rogan’s wife Emma says she doesn’t believe they ever lifted a stone. Sorry. It’s still not too late. It’s not too late to restore faith to the families. It’s not too late. That would… that would be nice.
Tim:
So Naomi, this whole potential investigation and prosecution of past crimes has been coming up a lot recently in British politics. British defense secretary Penny Mordaunt recently said that she wanted soldiers who had served during the Troubles to be covered by proposals that would effectively give them amnesty and amnesty to all British military veterans from prosecution. So why is this issue coming to the fore right now? What is it exactly that makes the idea of investigating crimes so explosive?
It’s a number of factors. On the one hand, attempts to get answers about the past have found some modest success as we’ve seen with the Ballymurphy Inquiry and the attempt to prosecute Soldier F for Bloody Sunday, and to a certain extent documentaries like the one we’ve been discussing. Particularly in the divided climate caused by Brexit, these advances have caused a severe backlash. Brexit has re-politicised Northern Ireland as an issue for the British right. It’s redrawn the old division lines of British versus Irish. Let’s listen to the Conservative MP and former soldier Mark Francois speaking in parliament using language you might normally expect from the Democratic Unionist Party.
The Northern Ireland Office under the Stormont House Agreement with parties in Northern Ireland agreed to established so-called legacy institutions to look into the past. The NIO’s interpretation of this is that they will set up some form of commission that will go back to 1968/9, so 50 years Mr Speaker, and re-examine every fatality again. That’s something like three and a half thousand cases. So any serviceman, any member of the RUC GC, who fired a fatal shot will be reinvestigated. But the alleged terrorists will not because under the Good Friday Agreement Tony Blair gave them so-called letters of comfort which means they are immune from prosecution. So this entire process would be utterly one sided because service personnel and members of the RUC GC would be liable to prosecution. Those with letters of comfort off scot free. Now Mr Speaker, after the appalling tragic events in Londonderry, we all want to see the Northern Ireland Executive re-established. Of course we do, but that cannot be the price of some rancid backstairs deal between the Northern Ireland Office and Sinn Fein IRA to sell Corporal Johnny Atkins down the river as the price of re-establishing the executive. Up with that sir, I believe, this house will not put. We have a moral duty to defend those who defended us and we abrogate that duty if, for reasons of political convenience, we allow the scapegoating of our veterans to pander to terrorists
Tim:
In part what he is doing there, I suppose, is picking apart the peace process itself. Part of persuading the paramilitaries to disarm and hold their cease fire during the peace process involved the release of many prisoners and, in some cases, convincing them that they would have a stake in the new peaceful Northern Ireland by assuring them they wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Yes, and if you listen to what the political representatives of the veterans groups say, a substantial part of what upsets them is they feel they are being treated more harshly than those they were fighting against. That they feel that they were acting in defence of their country as soldiers on deployment and they should be immune to being held for the account for acts they say they were ordered to do. In this particular political moment that sense of grievance is tied up with the frustration of Brexit not being delivered. The hard Brexiteers and those who are most callous about what happens to the border are often the same people who are most ardently committed to protecting veterans. This is most explicitly obvious with the pro veteran and pro Brexit street protests which are taking place in Britain now almost weekly with marches to the Parliament or to the BBC, often featuring the same people often people on motorbikes, biker gangs demonstrating for veterans or for Brexit. As we record, the Conservative party is gearing up for a leadership contest to replace Theresa May and this issue is also a factor in that. The Conservative MP Johnny Mercer, who’s himself a former army officer, recently withdrew support for Theresa May as prime minister, accusing her of betraying veterans by blocking a bid to give them immunity. Some of those who wish to succeed her are competing to court this increasingly active pro Brexit pro veterans voting bloc and the veterans have even formed their own party to pursue the issue. It’s called The Veterans and People’s Party and here’s their leader Robin Horsfall giving a rallying cry over Facebook.
We haven’t gone away you know. We’ll be back again and again and again. Three years ago we began this fight against the political persecution of soldiers who served in Northern Ireland. Our protests are getting bigger and bigger. The great weight of four million ex-servicemen and women has started to roll. We’re becoming political, many for the first time, because we know the difference between right and wrong. We know when our government is behaving in a corrupt and indecent manner. We know when we’re being sold a crock of manure. The government are worried, worried that their sneaky and convenient arrangements with Sinn Fein and their dissident Republican splinter groups will be uncovered. There will be more sly negotiations and lies in the hope that we will go home and forget. We won’t forget and we won’t stop. We are coming for your seats in Parliament. We’re coming for your power. It’s time for you to be afraid of the moral majority of those who know what decency means. We’re coming for you at the ballot box. We are not going away. Veterans and Peoples Party- who dares, shares.
Tim:
Whoa. Holy shit. Jesus. It is it is interesting to hear the echoes of Brexit rhetoric there actually isn’t it, but, you know, speeches like this also show, I suppose, how much this general backlash in Westminster has brought up direct and active threats to the Good Friday Agreement and everything it stands for. But of course in the background of all this grandstanding, the reality remains that there are still a set of families in Loughinisland whose innocent brothers and fathers, you know, were shot dead and they may never see justice done for those killings. It’s worth saying as we finish up that, according to the makers of No Stone Unturned, the British government currently refuses to release 50 million documents relating to those murders, the role of informants and the state’s actions during the Troubles
In part two we’re going to examine personal root to deal with the past. What are the different ways in which people cope when a conflict has robbed them of a family member, often with no explanation as to why, and what are the implications of living in a place where so many people have been touched by loss?
Tim:
If you tune in next time, you’ll hear voices of the so-called peace babies that Lyra McKee wrote about. We’ll discuss intergenerational trauma and how an incredibly creative flowering has grown out of the devastation caused by the conflict.
As part of that we’ll have something completely new for the Irish passport; a poetry reading from the brilliant Gael McConnell. Her poetry touches on pretty much everything we’ve been talking about and somehow expresses it better than we ever could, and I can’t wait to share it with you
Tim:
Before we go, we’d like to thank as always our Season Three sponsor Biddy Murphy dot com. Head along to the Biddy Murphy website to find authentic Irish products made by small craftspeople on the island of Ireland. Until next time guys.