Interviewing anyone remotely is never ideal, and sure enough, there are the inevitable technical glitches establishing a decent Zoom connection before Trevor Birney is finally able to converse from his Belfast home. But the 57-year-old journalist, film-maker and author disregards such minor snags in jovial fashion. After all, he knows there are greater risks to worry about when he’s on a call.
“It was something that journalists in the North joked about: ‘Your phone’s probably bugged’,” Birney says. “But I’ve had two calls in the past week where people have said to me, ‘Is it safe for me to call you?’ And I have to say, ‘I really can’t give you a 100 per cent guarantee that this call isn’t being listened to, but we’re not breaking the law, so let’s speak openly.’ But there are now people who are afraid of conversing with me over a form of communication, so I’m always alert. And I do think there is a legacy to all of this, that we’re different people to who we were before August 31st, 2018.”
The date Birney mentions is a dark moment in his life, as well as a pivotal event in his new book, Shooting Crows. It was the day when he and fellow journalist Barry McCaffrey were arrested by Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers investigating the leak of confidential documents about the infamous Loughinisland massacre in June 1994. The atrocity, which saw UVF gunmen burst into the Heights Bar and murder six men watching the Republic of Ireland play Italy in the World Cup finals, shook the country at a time when the IRA was inching towards ceasefire.
But as investigators dragged their heels, survivors and victims’ families began to suspect collusion between security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries who committed the murders. This suspicion was confirmed in the 2017 documentary No Stone Unturned, produced by Birney and directed by American director Alex Gibney, which featured documents, leaked to McCaffrey, that proved officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC, the North’s then police force) knew the identities of the killers.
But the PSNI didn’t go after the shooters. Instead Birney was shocked when a team of police officers arrived early that morning to raid the home he shares with his wife, Sheila, and their three daughters, before detaining him. It’s a scene vividly recounted in his book, but he still bristles at the memory.
“Honestly I never thought in my wildest dreams – or nightmares – that the PSNI would decide that the moral compass after the film pointed in the direction of journalists and leaks,” he says. As to why he was arrested – the case was eventually dismissed – Birney suspects police officers past and present pressured PSNI leaders into the investigation. But he feels there were other factors at play too.
“I think the PSNI wanted to send a chill factor into the journalistic community in the North, to say if you’re going to go after legacy issues, then this is what you can expect to happen to you,” he says. (The title Shooting Crows refers to the comments of the judge granting the warrant to raid Birney’s home, who worried that it was an exercise in scaring off others.) “I fear that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of stories that are buried in the files of the PSNI and will never be told. And I think that there’s a policy of keeping that door locked and sealed off from relatives.”
Birney, whose cheerfully loquacious manner belies a professional determination and prodigious work ethic, has spent his career trying to pick those locks. Starting out as a newspaper and broadcast journalist, he’s known as a film-maker and writer whose projects have included controversial businessman Seán Quinn and incendiary Belfast rappers Kneecap. His new book is the culmination of a decade of delving into the Loughinisland killings.
Mixing pacy narrative with forensic detail, Shooting Crows recounts the background to the terrible, as well as revealing the labyrinthine connections between the killers and their intelligence handlers. Some of the material is familiar from No Stone Unturned, which named a local UVF member as the main gunman and revealed that his wife later informed his identity to the police. (Neither were ever charged.) But there are remarkable new revelations, notably that prior to Birney’s arrest 24 years later, PSNI officers visited the man named as the main gunman to ascertain whether he had been upset by the film. Unsurprisingly, this Kafka-esque experience left its mark on Birney’s family.
“It changed our lives. I can see it in the faces of my daughters,” he says. “Their attitude to the North and life in Belfast has suffered, because I think what it did was force them to take a side. It was like that moment where they felt they had to stand up.”
Growing up in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, during the Troubles, Birney was conscious there were two sides to any story. One of three brothers, he was raised in “a very strict Protestant home”: his mother, who still lives in Enniskillen, worked in the canteen of a Catholic school, while his late father was employed by the electricity board, while also serving as a part-time RUC officer. “It wasn’t about queen and country, he didn’t have that high notion about it. It brought us a few more quid and I think he just enjoyed the social aspect,” Birney recalls. “I never heard a sectarian word come out of my father’s mouth.”
Birney started mixing with Catholics from an early age, when he started playing for the local soccer club. “I learnt from having the freedom to go to that football club, and later from making friends with everybody there, that there was a different perspective. So Enniskillen gave us that gift, and my mother and father allowed us to explore that, and never saw it as a conflict at all.”
When he was 17, Birney started working for local paper the Impartial Reporter; by the 1990s, he was a key member of UTV’s Insight programme. When the station’s current affairs department was closed down in 2005, he cofounded a television production company, Below the Radar, and later, a news website, The Detail, where he first met McCaffrey. “We tried to bring a broad spectrum of journalists together under one roof and just let them at it,” Birney says. “And that’s what Barry did, he started investigating Loughinisland and away we went.”
It was through the Loughinisland story that Birney first started working with Gibney, with whom he made the 2014 television documentary on the killings, Ceasefire Massacre. Birney describes the American film-maker, best known for documentary features such as the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, as “a master storyteller”. Birney set up another production company, Fine Point Films, seeking to emulate Gibney’s approach of high production values and compelling factual storylines. One of the resulting highlights is Quinn Country, Birney’s epic 2022 RTÉ documentary series on the spectacular rise and fall of businessman Seán Quinn.
“I just walked through Seán Quinn’s door at a time when he was looking for someone to listen to him and tell his story,” recalls Birney, who also wrote a bestselling biography of Quinn, entitled Quinn. “I think possibly because I’d been arrested only a few months before, he thought, this is my guy.” Since his newspaper days in Enniskillen, Birney had followed Quinn, a fellow Fermanagh native: “He was this really enigmatic, towering figure who cast a shadow right over that Border area.” Birney’s documentary not only traced Quinn’s canny expansion of his sprawling business empire, but also how that unprecedented local wealth ensured local support after he lost billions on shares in the doomed Anglo-Irish Bank. “I think Quinn became more of a chieftain than a titan of industry, but demanded 100 per cent loyalty in return,” Birney says. “He owned everything, and I think that’s where the dark side came through, because he felt everybody owed him.”
More recently, Birney revisited the murky legacy of the Troubles with Murder of a GAA Chairman, his RTÉ documentary about Sean Brown, who was kidnapped and killed by loyalist terrorists as he locked up the GAA clubhouse in Bellaghy, Co Derry, in 1997. (Full disclosure: my late father, Seamus Heaney, knew Brown and features in the film.) Birney’s documentary meticulously follows a familiar trail of botched investigations and paramilitary suspects working as state agents: in other words, collusion, the subject that got Birney arrested in 2018.
“Of course, there was a sense of trepidation about stepping back into this,” he says. “However, one meeting with the Brown family and all that goes out the window, because you’re completely compelled by their dignity and determination. Collusion becomes this nebulous word that’s thrown around, but you’ve got to root it in people’s experience, and there’s no greater example in some ways than the Brown family and what’s happened to them. The way they’ve been treated by the [British] state is horrific.”
Not that all Birney’s projects are so grim in content. Recently, he has produced documentaries on 1980s Los Angeles group the Go-Gos and American singer Cyndi Lauper, as well as working on a film about Boy George. Closer to home, he has produced Kneecap, an acclaimed feature film about the eponymous Irish-language rap act, and is also producing Saipan, the forthcoming movie about Roy Keane’s sensational exit from the Ireland team before the 2002 World Cup, starring Steve Coogan as manager Mick McCarthy.
Such projects bring out Birney’s enthusiastic side, as he praises Kneecap’s English director Rich Peppiatt – “There’s a spark and intelligence about him” – and Cork actor Éanna Hardwicke’s performance as Roy Keane: “When he started to get into character, I was little afraid of him.” But while he has diversified into unexpected areas, Birney sees a common thread throughout his varied slate of projects.
“It all makes sense in my mind,” he says. “Like Kneecap, I think Saipan is going to surprise a lot of people, they’re going to go into it thinking one thing and come out thinking another. And that’s all we do as journalists, we inform, educate and entertain.”
Still, the spectre of the Troubles, and specifically collusion, remains close to his heart. With Shooting Crows, Birney hopes he’s written a book that sheds light on the dark corners of the Northern conflict. But he also thinks of his father, wondering what he would have made of his son’s revelations – “My mother says he’d be 100 per cent behind me” – while remembering how lives could be shattered in an instant.
“I do believe that my father could have become expendable if he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, if there was an informer that the RUC or MI5 wanted to protect, and we’d never have known,” Birney says firmly. “And that is absolutely what drives me. I do believe that there’s still a lot out there that hasn’t been told, on both sides of the conflict. But to fully understand it you have to know who the personnel are, and how and why they got away with it.”
Shooting Crows by Trevor Birney is published by Merrion Press
