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- The Observer,
- Sunday May 11 2003
Her words came back to me to last Wednesday as I sat in the waiting room of Castlereagh police station in east Belfast. I was waiting to be interviewed by two plain-clothes detectives who had previously agreed to postpone the little chat for a few days in the absence of a lawyer. Now accompanied by a doughty defender of civil liberties (ie the lawyer), I waited anxiously for the questioning to begin.
The background to this encounter with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has been well documented elsewhere. Briefly, my name was found on documents during a raid on the home of an ex-police officer almost a fortnight ago. This was the same former cop who is the alleged source of highly embarrassing leaked telephone transcripts that expose the cosy relationship between Martin McGuinness, Mo Mowlam and Tony Blair's chief-of-staff Jonathan Powell.
The incriminating document in my case concerns a confidentiality agreement between the officer and myself. The agreement protects his memoirs, which he has tasked me along with his publishers to re-write and sub-edit. So contrary to what the Derry News thought earlier last week, the project has little or nothing to do with Martin McGuinness and instead focuses on a very personal story of service, sacrifice and betrayal.
In truth, the two policemen who interviewed me were the paragons of politeness. There were no threats of charges, future arrests, or raids on The Observer's Ireland bureau. In fact, the overriding impression I gained from our 50-minute talk was one of deep embarrassment. Perhaps I am wrong but I sensed that the two men were uneasy about pursuing a member of the fourth estate with only a tentative connection to the McGuinness/ Powell/Mowlam leaks scandal. My own feeling about the experience was that it seemed to be a rather surreal waste of police time and resources.
What Liam Clarke and his wife Kathy Johnston (the co-authors of the unofficial biography of Martin McGuinness) endured was in contrast truly disgraceful. The heavy-handed way in which their home was raided, binbags full of documents seized and then placed in custody for 23 hours marked a new low in the relations between journalists and the state in Northern Ireland. Without breaching confidentiality arrangements I can tell you that the officers' memoirs contain nothing that could compromise UK national security or lead to the deaths of informants. So why the clumsy overreaction in the Clarke/Johnston arrests and the bizarre attempt to suck me into the controversy?
The answer, I suspect, is that whoever made the decision to lock up the Clarkes based it on political rather than security considerations. That is to shut down anything that might potentially embarrass Number 10 and/or upset Mr McGuinness. Moreover, these latest moves fit into a pattern that began with the sacking of former head of Special Branch Bill Lowry. He lost his job amid allegations that he was giving unauthorised briefings to journalists about the break-in at - where else? - Castlereagh police station.
Since his sacking, journalists across the North have noted that their own police sources have become extremely jumpy to meet, talk on the phone or be seen in the company of reporters. The PSNI's new regime has clearly taken a leaf out of the New Labour book on media control. No one shall give off-the-record briefings to 'unhelpful' hacks anymore. Thou shall not co-operate with those that Downing Street and the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) cannot control or seduce with flattery. Slowly but surely any story, hint or indication that all may not be well with the peace process is being squeezed.
While all this nonsense over the memoirs of one ex-cop was going on, other journalists in the North were facing danger from another, more sinister quarter - the Ulster Defence Association. Despite the best efforts of its Dublin-based high command, the Sunday World is entering the ninth week of a UDA-backed boycott. Shops in Protestant areas of Northern Ireland have been ordered not to stock the tabloid on their shelves thus depriving consumers of their right to read what they want, when they want. Van drivers who normally distribute the paper across the North have been warned not to drop off bundles of the World in loyalist redoubts.
'There is always someone worse off than you' and in my case that is not just the Clarkes but also the entire staff at the Sunday World 's northern office. The pressure on them over these past few weeks has been enormous. Morale among many of them has hit rock bottom, particularly after they found out that stories exposing some of the UDA's more nefarious activities somehow did not appear anywhere in their paper during these weeks.
There is now the very real possibility of a newspaper group capitulating to a terror group for purely commercial reasons, which is bad not just for the Sunday World 's northern reporters or its thousands of readers, but also for the entire public out there who need and demand a free press as one of the guarantors of democracy.
