It was a Saturday night.
The Republic of Ireland were playing Italy
in the World Cup Soccer Championships in New York.
So the whole of Ireland was absolutely transfixed on
the Irish team and if they could beat the Italians.
Bars the length and breadth of the country
were filling up by teatime on the evening,
with the kick off due at eight o’clock.
And in this little, sleepy rural area known as Loughinisland—
it’s not even a hamlet, it’s a crossroads—
there is this one little bar called The Heights.
This was a little sleepy village
that had never witnessed the savagery,
the barbarity of the Troubles of Northern Ireland.
But at the last minute, on the last day...
it came.
Last night, 24 people were in the bar watching the match.
Two UVF gunmen came in
and sprayed them with automatic fire.
In a matter of seconds, five men lay dead,
a sixth died afterwards.
The gunman knew that everyone inside would probably be a Catholic,
would probably be a nationalist,
and that’s why they chose that bar on that night.
It’s just beneath contempt,
people who could carry out this type of thing.
The solicitor for the Loughinisland families
would say that the police had a treasure trove of evidence.
They had the car that the killers used.
They had the boiler suits that the killers wore.
They had the balaclavas that the killers wore.
They found the guns that were used.
But despite all of that,
police failed to bring one single member of that gang to court
and charge them with the massacre.
All media organizations would have faced going to jail
if they did what we did.
[Investigators World Cup Massacre]
I’m Trevor Birney.
I’m a journalist, a producer.
My name is Barry McCaffrey.
I am an investigative journalist from Belfast in Northern Ireland.
When we began working together, Barry talked about Loughinisland.
And at that stage,
there hadn’t been a huge amount of press or investigation,
so Barry began to investigate for our website, The Detail.
And during that investigation, I said,
“Hang on, there’s a major documentary in this.”
And for the next five years, it became our lives.
Trevor’s life and my life and many others’.
The Loughinisland families never spoke
for the first ten years.
They didn’t do interviews.
The police had told them, “Trust us, and we will leave no stone unturned.
We will bring the killers to justice.”
It wasn’t until the tenth anniversary
that they decided that they had been betrayed by the police,
by the state, by the system.
And they made contact with myself
and said that they wanted to speak for the first time.
Ten years with no information,
no liaison with the families.
We were kept in the dark.
If a victim and the victim's families open their hearts to you
and tell you their innermost feelings and secrets and how they feel,
and they trust you to tell their story honestly
and with compassion,
and if you fail them,
that’s unforgivable.
I had been working on the Loughinisland story,
the atrocity,
for roughly six years,
and this was maybe the summer of 2011.
An envelope arrived, and when I opened it up,
it was maybe 60 pages.
The document that was leaked to Barry McCaffrey
was a secret report that had been drafted by
an organization called the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland.
When you get some of these documents,
you’ll go through it with a fine-tooth comb.
You’ll read it hundreds of times because you are looking for...
you’re looking for the trail.
So I found the name Jimmy Binns.
Jimmy had been a policeman.
And he was there at the time of Loughinisland
and knew huge amounts of information.
I found a contact number for him,
and I telephoned him.
He picks up the phone, and I explain who I am and what we’re doing,
and we’re looking into Loughinisland.
And Jimmy says,
“Yeah, I’ve been waiting for this phone call for years.
I’ve been waiting to tell the truth.”
And we know that he had told the truth
because he had told the Police Ombudsman
that the police knew that the attack was going to take place,
but they had failed to stop the killings.
We had to say to Jimmy, “But if you tell this story,
you can’t go back to the job that you’re doing in West Belfast
because you’ll get killed.”
And he said, “No, I’ve thought about it.
I'm at ease with myself.
It’s the right thing to do.”
And that’s what he did.
He told the story, and he unlocked everything.
It was like a light bulb going on.
It was like a curtain being pulled back.
It was... it was the smoking gun.
No Stone Unturned
not only of the massacre on the night of the 18th of June, 1994
but of the police investigation and the collusion between
the police and the killers.
As the years pass and we understand what was going on in the Troubles,
what we now realize is that when the IRA was killing British soldiers,
killing police officers,
someone somewhere in the British government
decided that the way to fight back
was to arm loyalist paramilitaries,
give them intelligence, provide them with targets,
cover up for the killings, collude with them
in order to fight back.
The state allowed their loved ones to die
to protect informers and to protect police agents.
Everyone was talking about the film.
Audiences the length and breadth of Ireland
were turning out to see it.
The families were delighted
that the film had given them a moment of truth.
But my ear was caught by a statement that was released
by the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland,
the PSNI.
And he said that he was not going to investigate the massacre
but was going to investigate the leak of the document
to Barry McCaffrey in the film.
And that concerned me a little.
As a journalist, I’ve heard of a lot of leak inquiries.
Generally, they go nowhere.
But my lawyer whispered in my ear,
“You are now the subject of a criminal inquiry.
Just remember that.”
Once the film came out,
there was a likelihood that two things were going to happen.
Either we were going to get killed by the killer, by the UVF,
or we’d be arrested by the police.
So when this knock comes at the door
and I look down the stairs and I see this boiler suit,
and I’m thinking, “I wonder which one it is?”
There are police cars.
Oh my God, there’s lots of police outside.
And I instinctively knew...
this is about Loughinisland.
By that stage, the police were seizing everything.
They were taking the phones, taking the laptops, iPads,
you know, everything they could get their hands on.
We were taken downtown to a police station,
which is normally used for terrorist suspects,
and we were actually taken into the second floor terrorist suite.
That’s when you realize, oh, this isn’t good.
You know, we’re not walking out of here.
When a cell door closes behind you for the first time in your life,
it is a moment you’ll never forget.
When you see this plastic mattress lying on one side,
you see the toilet,
and you realize that you are incarcerated.
So I got underneath the blankets
and I had a wee cry to myself, you know?
Because you think the world’s against you.
So I was in the cell for a couple of hours,
and then the door opened,
and I was told that my solicitor was there to see me.
And I went up and I spoke to Niall, and Niall immediately said,
“OK, Trevor, you’ve got a decision to take,
and I want you to think very seriously about this.
There is an opportunity to go to the High Court in Belfast
and start a judicial review
to try to take on what has just happened to you.
But before you do that, you’ve got to weigh up the cost,
the potential cost of that judicial review
because it could run into tens of thousands of pounds.
By the way, the police are raiding your offices.
So they’ve arrested you, they’ve arrested Barry,
and they’re now tearing through your office, looking for documents.
Now what do you want to do?”
And I didn’t have to think about it.
I said, “Go to court, try to get this stopped.”
It was Trevor and me on one side,
and the very British establishment on the other.
This was designed to send out a message.
If you investigate the past,
if you uncover the truth of the dirty war in Northern Ireland,
this is what could happen to you.
This was about telling journalists, “Don’t go there.
Don’t ask the questions. Don’t expose the wrongdoing.
Because if you do, you’re going to jail.”
We have been in the police station all day.
We have endured four PACE taped interviews.
Throughout those interviews,
not one scintilla of evidence was put to Mr. Birney.
By 6:00 pm on the day of our arrest,
the Lord Chief Justice in Northern Ireland
had ordered the police to stop the searches
and to bag all the evidence
and not to look at the computers and notebooks
and everything they’d taken from our office.
We weren’t fighting for Trevor and us.
We were fighting for press freedom because if we lost,
all journalists lost.
All media and its organizations would have faced going to jail
if they did what we did.
Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey
will now consider their legal options.
But the more pressing question for them
is what’s going to happen on foot of the allegations made
in the documentary about the Loughinisland murders?
[Barry and Trevor’s case went to Belfast High Court}
[The judge rebuked the police investigation]
[and they were awarded £850,000 in compensation.]
[No one has yet been prosecuted for the Loughinisland Massacre.]