Film
No Stone Unturned
- Director
- Alex Gibney
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 75 mins
Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey spent years working on the story of the Loughinisland massacre – the murder of six men in a bar in Northern Ireland in 1994. The victims, all Catholics, were killed indiscriminately as they watched a World Cup football match on TV. It was clearly a sectarian murder, and members of the Ulster Volunteer Force were blamed. Police promised the relatives of those murdered to leave “no stone unturned” in their search for the three killers. Yet no one has ever been jailed for the massacre.
Birney and McCaffrey, convinced that the names of the suspects were known to the police, worked with filmmaker Alex Gibney (prolific Oscar-winning director of many documentaries including Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) to expose to the public what they believed the police knew about the atrocity. Acclaimed as “a scrupulous documentary” by The Guardian, No Turn Unturned includes testimony from survivors, relatives, police and members of terrorist organisations about the murder investigation that went nowhere. It also names the three alleged killers, one said to be a British soldier.
Yet when the film was released, police took no action against the men named as murderers. Instead, 100 officers took part in raids on the homes of Bireny and McCaffrey. They were accused of stealing confidential information from the office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland. Their computers, thousands of files and phones were sized and they were placed on bail with strict conditions, including having to give notice if they wanted to leave Northern Ireland.
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It emerged that no theft had been reported by the police ombudsman – but the investigation into the two journalists lasted almost a year, until on May 31, 2019 three High Court judges ruled that the search warrants against the journalists should never have been issued. A week later, police dropped the case. It took almost a year before a High Court judge ruled that the police action was unwarranted and the journalists had merely been doing their job.
This first local screening of No Stone Unturned has been organised by the NUJ, which supported both journamists throughout their ordeal. It will be follwoed by a Q&A with Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, hosted by Bristol NUJ. They will discuss the ongoing impact of the case – and its lessons for freedom of speech.
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