‘The police don’t arrest journalists just for doing their job. Do they?’ - Shooting Crows: Mass Murder, State Collusion and Press Freedom

At around 8.20am, the cell door slammed shut behind me. The day had taken a dramatic turn. I was incarcerated for the first time in my life.

There was a blue plastic mattress on a shelf to my right and a toilet and wash-hand basin to my left. On the wall in front of me were 42 glass bricks. I counted them repeatedly as I began to consider just what had happened.

I began to pace the cell. I started banging on the wall to try to get Barry to respond. I sat down on the mattress, thinking of my 80-year-old mother in Enniskillen and wondering how she would find out what was going on. It wasn’t easy to concentrate with so much swirling around my mind.

In the next cell, Barry was having similar problems. He had slept in and had been rushing to get ready for the day ahead when the knock came on his door.

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“I’m in the bathroom just about to start shaving when the doorbell rings. Immediately I know there’s something wrong. No-one rings my doorbell at 7am. No-one actually ever rings my doorbell,” he later told me.

“I go to the top of the landing and look down the stairs to see through the glass panel in the front door that there is a large male in a dark blue boiler suit and matching baseball cap with his finger on the bell. That’s no postman, I think. He doesn’t even have a bag.

“My first thoughts are that someone’s had an accident. But deep in my heart I know exactly what is about to go down. The choice was either I was going to be shot or be arrested. The caller at the door is dressed in a boiler suit.

“The police don’t arrest journalists just for doing their job. Do they? In that split second at the top of the stairs I decide that, if it is the police, resistance is going to be futile. They are going to be coming through that door one way or another.

“The only thing I have left now is self-control, self-composure. I decide my only weapon to hand now is indifference, show no emotion, give nothing away, kill them with kindness and say nothing.”

Barry had a similar start to that morning as I had, feeling emotional too when the cell door locked behind him. Barry remembers surveying his new surroundings: “There is one threadbare blanket folded neatly on the bed. There is a camera up high on the wall, which I suspect is watching my every move.

“I consciously remove my shirt, trousers, socks and T-shirt and fold them neatly beside my bed. For the first time that morning I try to properly assess where I am and what is happening. I am in serious trouble. I pull the blankets up over my head and I cry. Am I on my own? Who else has been arrested?

“I am shaken out of my self-pity by a booming voice coming down the corridor. I have no idea what time it is as they have taken my watch from me. But I instinctively know the owner of the voice. Like anyone with hearing difficulties, Trevor Birney has to speak loudly. I immediately know it’s him and almost at once feel a big wave of reassurance. I hear a banging on my cell door: ‘Are you singing like a canary, McCaffrey?’”

Back at home, Sheila was struggling with having our home invaded. Using her sarcastic sense of humour to best effect, she reminded the officers that there were children in the house who had never experienced armed police in their home or seen their father arrested.

The search officers were going through our books, personal effects, cupboards, children’s rooms, taking her mobile phone without explanation along with a small pink handset that belonged to one of our daughters.

However, they failed to find the single sheet of paper for which they were apparently looking.

***

Over the course of the next 12 hours, the day descended further into farce. I don’t know how long it was until a custody officer came into the cell to say that my solicitor was here. He waited while I put on my shoes and walked me back past the cell doors and through a series of nondescript corridors to a small, dark room where Niall was waiting.

“Alright?” we both said in unison.

I couldn’t sit down, so we walked around the room, trying to make sense of it all. He confirmed that it was only Barry who had also been arrested, and that no-one else had been, thank God. Niall told me two other things.

“One, this will be a no comment interview, you will not answer any question. Two, you are going to witness a very different me in the interview. This is what I do, and you’ve got to trust me.”

I did trust him, so there was no issue with that.

The search officers were going through our books, personal effects, cupboards, children’s rooms, taking her mobile phone without explanation along with a small pink handset that belonged to one of our daughters. However, they failed to find the single sheet of paper for which they were apparently looking

By then, Niall had examined why we had been arrested and said he needed me to fully understand the implications.

There were four separate offences. The first was theft of the Scope documents. The second was handling stolen goods, i.e. the Scope documents. There was also a charge of unlawfully obtaining personal data, which turned out to be Albert Carroll’s phone number.

But it was the fourth that most worried him: “Unlawful disclosure of information entrusted in confidence contrary to Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act 1989.”

Niall broke the bad news. If found guilty of a breach of the OSA, we could be jailed for 10 years. The good news was that there had never been a successful prosecution in the UK of anyone alleged to have breached the OSA.

Indeed, to his knowledge there had never even been an arrest under the legislation in Northern Ireland. But the very fact that the PSNI and Durham had arrested us on this basis was an indication of the seriousness of their intent.

Shooting Crows: Mass Murder, State Collusion and Press Freedom by Trevor Birney is published by Merrion Press, £18.99 and available now.

Trevor Birney interview in Weekend, P40