Earlier this week, Barry McCaffrey and I boarded a flight to London and it wasn’t for a bit of last minute Christmas shopping.
For the past 18-months we’ve been traveling back and forward to attend hearings in the United Kingdom’s most secretive court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Tucked away at the very back of the Royal Courts of Justice, the tribunal has sat in Court 72 for our case.
It just happens to be the farthest court from the front door. Unless you know where it is, you’d get lost in the labyrinth of corridors and stairs. But there’s a very good reason it’s so far out of the way.
This is the only court in the UK to hold the spooks – MI5, MI6, GCHQ and police intelligence departments – to account. Complainants haven’t had much success over the past 20 years.
Of the 4370 cases, only 46 - one percent - of complaints have been upheld. Barry and I have been on this journey together now for over a decade. He’d been at the Irish News in Belfast for many years but we began working when we launched the investigative website, The Detail.
As a highly experienced and respected journalist, Barry had well-placed sources and expert knowledge of the conflict. Right from the first moment he came to our offices, he said he wanted to investigative the murders of six men in the Loughinisland Massacre on a night that is remembered in Ireland and around the world for very different events.
Pictured (l-r) with copies of "Shootings Crows," solicitor Niall Murphy, Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey.
When Ray Houghton lobbed the ball into the Italian net at Giants Stadium on June 18th, 1994, Irish football fans lost their minds. But back in The Heights Bar, supporters watching on television lost their lives.
Members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) had been terrorising South Down for several years, armed with assault rifles and handguns that had been part of the infamous South African shipment that arrived in the North in late 1987 or early 1988.
British intelligence knew of the shipment but did nothing to prevent it falling into the hands of Loyalists terrorists. There are many today who believe that MI5 were actually behind the shipment which would dramatically alter the course of the conflict in the years that followed.
In March, 1988, the hand grenades thrown by Michael Stone in Milltown Cemetery, during the funerals of the three IRA members shot by the SAS in Gibraltar, were the first indication that Loyalists had been rearmed.
The RUC did recover most of the shipment that was destined for the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) but the UVF and Ulster Resistance, established by the DUP in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, retained much of their weaponry.
Barney Green, aged 87, was smoking his pipe and enjoying his whiskey just inside the door when the gunman arrived shortly after half-time in the Ireland-Italy game.
There were around 15 others in the Heights, most of them gathered along the L-shaped bar in a living room sized country pub glued to the television slung above the barman, Aidan O’Toole.
His father, Hugh, and a group of local men had left early that morning on a mission to bring clothes and food to Romanian orphans. Barney didn’t stand a chance.
The gunman, dressed in blue overalls and wearing a black balaclava, dropped to his knee after entering the bar, taking up a military stance that he had learned while he was a member of the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment.
He opened fire with a VA-58 rifle, which is similar in design to the famed AK-47, spraying his magazine of 39 rounds in less than three seconds around the bar.
When he left, Barney and five of his friends and neighbous were dead or dying.
The imposing facade of the Royal Courts of Justice in London.
Five others were wounded. Commentary on the game by RTE’s George Hamilton could still be heard through the smoke and cries when the first responders arrived.
The RUC sealed off the area and began a murder investigation. Within 12 hours, their Special Branch colleagues were able to supply the names of the chief suspects – the UVF team led by the gunman and based out of the village of Clough, just two miles south of Loughinisland.
The Special Branch knew the killers because at least one them was an informant in their pay.
One of the detectives leading the investigation was under pressure. Not due to the massacre, but because he was due to go on vacation the following morning.
But his boss had his back and told him to take his holiday. There was no need to worry about the small matter of catching the killers behind the massacre of six Catholic men.
Eventually, the chief suspect was arrested, but only after he received a call from the RUC telling him he was going to be taken into custody the following morning.
A completely normal event set against the context of the institutional collusion between the RUC and the UVF. For many years the families of those that died said nothing. The RUC spent days in the area after the attack speaking to eyewitnesses and the bereaved.
Over tea and sandwiches around kitchen tables, the relatives of the dead were giving the same commitment: “The RUC will leave no stone unturned in the hunt for the killers.”
It was only a matter of time. The guilty would be charged and convicted. Weeks turned into months without any justice.
Years passed by. Emma Rogan turned eighteen, ten years after her father “Frosty” had been murdered. She’d seen her mother and her family struggle and suffer, not only from the emotional and financial pain of losing a husband and a father, but from the indignity that came with realising the RUC had no intention of putting Frosty’s killers behind bars, despite all their promises.
The families began a campaign for justice. They hired a young human rights lawyer, Niall Murphy, and made a complaint to the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland. An investigation began led by a former Canadian police officer, Al Hutchinson.
More years passed. Hutchinson then invited them to a meeting where he disclosed that after an intense examination of the facts he had failed to find any evidence of collusion.
The families had come too far; they weren’t going to accept a whitewash.
They took the Ombudsman on and forced the withdrawal of his report. Indeed, their campaign led to Hutchinson having to leave his position early in his contract after serious failings were found in his office.
He’d gotten too close to the police force he was supposed to be holding to account. A new Ombudsman came in, Dr. Michael Maguire, and he began anew.
In June, 2016, Barry McCaffrey and I were in the room at the Loughinisland GAA club when Dr. Maguire confirmed the families worst fears – there was collusion between the UVF killers and the RUC.
Emma Rogan burst into tears, reaching out to her mother, Claire who was sitting beside her. By this point, Barry and I were working with Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, who had travelled from his home in New Jersey to direct a documentary that would be called “No Stone Unturned.”
While we were making the film, Barry had been leaked a secret report which detailed the extent of the collusion in the attack. We had plastered the document all over the film which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2017.
Understandably, the PSNI, having had the chance to see the film, decided to set up a new investigation. But their target wasn’t the killers.
Outside the Royal Courts of justice in London, Trevor Birney, flanked by Niall Murphy and Barry McCaffrey speaks to reporters.
No, the PSNI wanted to hunt down our source; the person who had leaked the document.
Somewhere along the line, the PSNI had lost its moral compass. Solving mass murder wasn’t their priority any more.
They decided to go after the journalists. Shortly before 7 a.m. on August 31st, 2018, dozens of armed police officers raided our homes. Barry and I were arrested under the British Official Secrets Act and taken to the terrorism detention center in downtown Belfast.
We fought back from our cells. Our lawyers went into court, arguing that the warrants used for the raids were unlawful. The court agreed and we were awarded substantial compensation.
But during the case, two words on the thousands of pages of disclosure we got from the PSNI jumped out. There was a “covert operation” in place against us prior to our arrest. Barry sought advice and we were told to make a complaint to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in London, which we did in the spring of 2019.
Five years later, we found ourselves travelling to London for the judgment in the case. Before the substantive hearing into our complaint last October, the PSNI and the Metropolitan Police (the Met) have already admitted that they unlawfully spied on Barry in 2012 and 2013.
Back at the Royal Courts of Justice, on Tuesday morning, the IPT ruled that the police had acted unlawfully in their surveillance operation against us in 2018. It’s a landmark judgment that makes British legal history and which introduces new legal protections for journalists and their sources.
But the case has much wider ramifications. Only because of our complaint, we discovered that the PSNI, supported by the Met, has had a dragnet operation against journalists, lawyers and activists in Northern Ireland for many years.
The operation against us was the tip of a very dark iceberg. Over 300 journalists and 500 lawyers have been the focus of surveillance by the PSNI over the past 14-years.
Data from their phones has been intercepted to see who the journalist’s sources were. The decision to go after two journalists has brought the PSNI into disrepute around the world. It was an attack on press freedom; on freedom of speech.
We’re now calling for a public inquiry into the culture within the police force that emerged as a direct result of the Good Friday Agreement.
We are not living in Stasi East Germany.
This is Northern Ireland, 30-years after the IRA ceasefire.
If only the PSNI realised that journalism isn’t a crime.
Trevor Birney is the author of "Shooting Crows" published by Merrion Press (www.merrionpress.ie). The book investigates the 1994 Loughinisland Massacre in 1994 and the dark story that followed. The book is available from numerous websites including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
