Scoops Not Filed

By AM Saturday, October 1, 2011

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A few days ago an article appeared in the Irish Times by Peter Murtagh. It related to the 1986 IRA killing of Frank Hegarty, one of its senior volunteers who had gone ‘over to the other side’ as Martin McGuinness put it. The other side ironically, given where Sinn Fein is today, was then the British state. There is little room for doubting that Hegarty was a British agent or that he was unaware that the sanction for going over to the other side was, as Martin McGuinness said, ‘death certainly.’ But that was less the point of Murtagh’s article than the role he alleges was played by McGuinness in the immediate aftermath of the killing.

Murtagh wrote that he visited the Hegarty home to interview the dead man’s loved ones and while there he was first confronted and then compelled to leave by two republican goondas.

There was a knock on the door. Two men came in. One stood directly in front of me, cutting me off from the women. The other engaged the woman who had been talking to me. I was ushered out, out to a waiting car. Inside the car sat Martin McGuinness. The family is very upset, he said. It wasn’t good to talk to them right now; in fact, they really couldn’t talk right now. It wasn’t a negotiation. The interview was over. Ended by McGuinness and his two heavies.

McGuinness, accused recently in many newspapers of having lured Hegarty to his death, was a Sinn Fein elected representative at the time. This context would have given legs to Murtagh’s account had he filed it immediately. Yet it was never published in the Guardian for whom he was covering the Stalker controversy when the Hegarty killing occured.

Most people probably accepted Murtagh’s Irish Times version of events, not being predisposed to accept much Martin McGuinness would have to say on the matter. Many of them probably feel that the current presidential candidate has little choice other than to be evasive on issues relating to his decades long IRA career. But a former Sinn Fein colleague of McGuinness, Danny Morrison, phoned Murtagh demanding to know why at the time he never filed the biggest scoop of the year. Murtagh told him he could not really remember but he was working on bigger stories at the time including the Stalker affair, adding that his car had once been hijacked in Derry and he had not written about that either.

While it was a tad hyperbolic for Morrison to claim that it was the biggest scoop of the year, there is no doubt that it was a serious story and would have made good copy for any newspaper. For whatever reason it was not published. Murtagh in his radio exchange with Morrison yesterday was steady. Morrison was assertive but admitted lying to Murtagh during the late night phone call which he falsely claimed to have taped. A tactical subterfuge no doubt, but one that probably gives an advantage by default to Murtagh who has admitted no dishonesty on his own part.

Whatever the facts behind the Murtagh story, his not filing the report is not an isolated event. On the 17th of October 2000, four days after the IRA had gunned down Joe O’Connor in West Belfast’s Ballymurphy, I was sitting with a journalist in my home less than half a kilometre from the scene of the killing. The journalist had come up to my home to interview Brendan Hughes. As he and I sat in our living room along with Brendan Hughes and my partner Carrie Twomey, two senior members of the IRA’s GHQ staff could be viewed from our living room approaching the house. I commented that it was the IRA. The journalist recognised one of the individuals and mentioned his name.

They knocked and after answering the door I led them into the kitchen where a fractious exchange ensued as they sought to intimidate both Carrie and myself over an article accusing the IRA of having killed O’Connor I had co-written with Tommy Gorman, published in that morning’s Irish News. The journalist, clearly aware that a noisy exchange was taking place, the details of which both I and my partner discussed at length with him and Brendan once the IRA people had left, nevertheless published nothing about it. Nor did the interview with Brendan Hughes, his reason for being in our home, appear anywhere either. His only public acknowledgement that a sharp exchange had taken place came some time later when the now deceased Jack Holland wrote an article about IRA attempts to suppress its critics. In that article Holland cited the journalist as admitting he had heard a heated exchange from behind two doors:

An American reporter was in the house when the incident occurred. He says he was in another room and did not hear any threat. However, he said “it was a heated discussion, heard through two doors.”

In addition to hearing a ‘heated discussion’, the reporter had firsthand accounts of what had taken place from both myself and Carrie Twomey. He knew the identity and seniority of at least one of the IRA intimidators. I wondered at the time why the report was never carried. It was only years later, after Brendan’s death, that he finally wrote about meeting Brendan in our home, and even then he still failed to mention the encounter with the IRA which took place while he was in the house.

Few journalists find themselves in the position of being within earshot of IRA intimidation of fellow journalists and when the opportunity presents itself it is not unreasonable to expect that a scoop is in the making. Despite my frustrations at the copy not being filed, I never thought the journalist was guilty of anything seriously untoward. While others have assumed a much more critical stance, in my view it was at worst a judgement call I would not have agreed with.  I have spoken to him on a number of occasions since and once addressed a group of students at his request. There were never any hard feelings between the two of us as a result of it. But what it confirmed for me was that journalists do not always file what others would regard as newsworthy. Because they do not is no reason to assume that an unreported event is one that did not happen.