On the morning of August 31st, 2018, award-winning film producer Trevor Birney was arrested at his home in Belfast while the PSNI searched the house as his bewildered family looked on.
They were searching, they said, for documents used in his powerful documentary, No Stone Unturned, that examined the 1994 Loughinisland massacre when the UVF shot six men dead as they watched the Ireland v Italy football match in a village bar.
That film unmasked in unflinching detail the collusion between the security forces in Northern Ireland and loyalist paramilitaries and it’s a controversial subject Birney has returned to in this new book, Shooting Crows.
The book’s title 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 other journalists.
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It set Birney on a path to prove historic and ongoing attempts by British authorities to silence journalists, film-makers, lawyers and activists in the North and to uncover surveillance and bugging operations.
Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Declan Conlon and John Casey.
