Two years ago, an investigative journalist began examining how the PSNI handled the death of a 14-year-old schoolboy. Then, it is alleged, the PSNI began spying on that journalist.
Noah Donohoe’s naked body was found in a storm drain in north Belfast in June 2020, almost a week after he’d gone missing.
The tragic and unusual nature of Noah’s death, along with criticism of the police search for him, led to substantial public concern.
Almost five years later, significant questions remain unanswered ahead of an inquest which the coroner has said he hopes will begin before the summer.
That inquest will seek to answer how Noah died. But separate to that is the question of how the PSNI has behaved since then.
Two years ago, experienced journalist Donal MacIntyre began investigating the disappearance for a book and a documentary.
A source has told the Belfast Telegraph that as Mr MacIntyre began his work, the PSNI moved to put him under significant online surveillance.
The spy operation — which we have been told was given a codename — is alleged to have begun in August 2023, the same month that the vast PSNI data breach threw the police into turmoil.
It is not known if the spying is still ongoing. The PSNI has not denied spying on the journalist, nor will it say whether Chief Constable Jon Boutcher — who arrived at the PSNI two months later — was made aware of what allegedly has been going on.
After being alerted to this by the Belfast Telegraph, Mr MacIntyre expressed dismay at what he’d learnt.
The journalist — who has made films for the BBC and written for multiple national newspapers — said: “I am disappointed but not shocked at these claims of unwarranted interference and intrusion into the work of law-abiding journalists.
“I am grateful to the Belfast Telegraph for bringing this information to me.
“It is shocking that the trigger for this alleged online and perhaps other monitoring was my team’s investigation into the Noah Donohoe case, which is supported by thousands of small donations from people who were not confident in the competence of the PSNI to investigate the full circumstances around Noah’s death.”
He added: “It is possible that in accessing my online activity, if true, then private communications between myself and Noah’s mother, Fiona, may have been accessed.”
The journalist said that aside from journalistic interference, the possibility that the PSNI may have spied on Noah’s mother was alarming.
Mr MacIntyre said that independently of what we’ve been told about the alleged spying on him, last October he suspected the PSNI was behind a break-in of his car when it was in Heathrow’s long stay car park.
He said that cash, jewellery and technology weren’t taken — but “very sensitive” documentation relating to his investigation was scattered all over the back seat.
When he reported the incident to the Metropolitan Police, they said that part of the car park was not covered by CCTV. He said that the police told him the situation was “odd” and asked him who he thought might have been interested in the material; he told them the only people he suspected were the PSNI.
Mr MacIntyre has now asked the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the intelligence watchdog, to investigate the issue and had also contacted the ongoing review by Angus McCullough KC into PSNI spying on journalists and lawyers.
However, the Belfast Telegraph understands from another source that Mr McCullough had been informed of the allegations in December or January.
Even though that was outside the deadline for submissions to his review, in an interim report published last month Mr McCullough said he hadn’t turned down any late requests for him to investigate, which indicates that he is examining this.
When we put question to the PSNI, the police twice asked for more time to respond. They then provided a statement which did not deny spying on Mr MacIntyre.
It said: “The Chief Constable recognises public concern in relation to the use of covert powers in respect of journalists, and has established the McCullough Review to provide additional reassurance to the public, the Northern Ireland Policing Board and stakeholders. It would be inappropriate to comment on any specific case.
“The PSNI would urge anyone with a complaint in relation to the use of covert powers by PSNI to engage with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
“It would be inappropriate for us to comment while the McCullough Review is ongoing.”
The allegation is extraordinary not only such spying would appear to be deeply improper, but because of the PSNI’s admission more than two years earlier that it had broken the law in its treatment of two journalists.
In 2020, the police agreed to pay £875,000 to Trevor Birney, Barry McCaffrey and Fine Point Films for unlawfully arrest and the seizure of journalistic material about the Loughinisland massacre.
The PSNI also unlawfully spied on the two men — something police spent years denying before the journalists achieved vindication last year at the IPT.
The Policing Board said it had not been informed of spying on Mr MacIntyre. The police oversight body said it wasn’t told the journalist’s name but it could be included by the PSNI in the anonymised data given to the board last year.
That data, contained in a 60-page report, showed significant police spying on both journalists and lawyers.
The PSNI accepted that “requests for communications data for journalists have the potential to engage the protection afforded to them not to disclose their journalistic sources” but said this protection was “not absolute”.
There are extreme circumstances — such as where a life could be saved by bugging a phone or hacking into emails — in which it is lawful for the police to spy on journalists or lawyers.
However, it is already clear that the PSNI has been acting far outside the law.
In 2022, the PSNI admitted that it had unlawfully spied on its own senior officers. It fought that case every step of the way for years, racking up a huge bill for taxpayers, before settling moments before it was finally to be heard by the IPT, which would have exposed it to public scrutiny.
Between 2011 and 2024, the PSNI made 323 applications for communications data relating to journalists who were victims, suspects or witnesses to crime.
Some of this will be entirely proper, such as where the PSNI are investigating the harassment of a journalist and are seeking to locate the perpetrator.
Ten of the PSNI applications explicitly sought to identify a journalistic source.
In the same period, there were 500 applications for communications data related to lawyers who were victims, suspects or witnesses to crime.
Most of this involves basic information about who was in contact with who rather than the content of their communications.
But the Belfast Telegraph has been told that what was allegedly done to Mr MacIntyre involved an even more sensitive type of spying, known as “directed surveillance”.
The PSNI itself accepts that the threshold for this is exceptionally high, saying that it involves covert behaviour “carried out in such a way that the intended person subject to them is unaware that those tactics are, or may be, being used.
Due to the covert nature of these tactics they are highly sensitive and strictly regulated”.
The PSNI describes directed surveillance as “surveillance that is covert but is not carried out in a private residence or vehicle. It can include covert recording of a person’s movement’s, conversations and other activities”.
It necessarily involves situations where police are likely to obtain “private information” which includes information relating to the individual’s private or family life.
Last year, the PSNI told the Policing Board that there had been “no authorised use of this power” used against journalists or lawyers since 2011.
We asked the PSNI if the Policing Board had been misled or if it stood over that claim.
At the time of going to press, the question remained unanswered.
The PSNI last year also told the Policing Board that since 2011 there have been four covert human intelligence sources — undercover spies — deployed against journalists or lawyers.
The police have continued to insist that things aren’t as bad as they seem.
Last year, the PSNI said: “The central public concern has been that there was widespread, and unjustified, surveillance of journalists and to a lesser extent lawyers.
by -Swifty
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“Without pre-judging the outcome of the independent review, the Police Service believes that this is not made out by the facts.”
It said that “the Chief Constable is personally committed to upholding and ensuring the protection afforded to lawyers and journalists is provided by the officers and staff within the PSNI”.
However, Séamus Dooley, assistant general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said: “The NUJ has the strongest reservations in relation to the IPT.
“The concept that the PSNI would urge anyone to engage with the IPT is in my view an inadequate response.”
He said that as a notice party to the Birney-McCaffery case he’d see how it was “a protracted and secretive process”.
Mr Dooley, who sits on a panel of experts and stakeholders advising the McCullough Review, also said: “While the McCullough Review is very important, there is in my view nothing preventing the PSNI from commenting on this case. It can’t hide behind the McCullough Review which of necessity will take some months.
“Any suspicion that a journalist conducting an investigation into a matter of legitimate public interest — and clearly the case of Noah Donohoe is one of grave public interest — gives cause for serious concern.
“From my personal and professional knowledge of Donal MacIntyre, there is no threat to the security of the state or nothing which could conceivably warrant spying on a journalist investigating the death of Noah Donahoe”.
North Belfast MP John Finucane said the allegation “demands immediate clarity”.
The Sinn Féin MP for the area where Noah’s body was found said the PSNI was “still recovering from the damage it inflicted on itself” when it arrested Mr McCaffrey and Mr Birney where the police “were clearly more interested in identifying journalistic sources than investigating crime”.
He added: “If this allegation is true that they directed their resources on a journalist, rather than investigating the circumstances around Noah Donohoe’s tragic death, then it is of the utmost seriousness and the public will rightly demand both transparency and accountability.”
The law now requires a judicial commissioner from an external body — the Investigatory Powers Commissioners Office — to approve every instance in which police want to obtain communications data to identify a journalist’s source
No one in the PSNI has been held accountable for the illegal spying uncovered to date.
In 2023, the Attorney General asked the media to be careful not to prejudice the inquest into Noah’s death, which will be heard by both the coroner and a jury.
Noah’s death has prompted the widespread online circulation of conspiracy theories unsupported by credible evidence as well as sectarian commentary.
But there have also from the outset been difficult questions for the PSNI about its actions.
Jon Boutcher has impressed many people with promises to fundamentally change the PSNI’s broken culture, and has brought in a respected senior lawyer to investigate this area.
Mr McCullough will form his own view, based on the evidence he can uncover and is hardly going to be influenced by whether the PSNI state publicly what happened here.
In not answering basic questions about these profoundly serious allegations, the PSNI isn’t helping itself recover from what increasingly looks like a disturbingly dark period in its history.
The PSNI don’t look great here, but that doesn’t make Donal McIntyre the hero.
He’s a self serving opportunist preying on a vulnerable woman.
Next you’ll be telling me that British police were spying on a future Prime Minister on behalf of Ronald McDonald
Rotten RUC never went away.
Not exactly “spying” if they’re not trying to hide it, they’ve not got yer man secret agent 007 Jimmy Bundy on the case lol
“Alright, lads, should we try and tackle antisocial behaviour, domestic violence, or hate crime?”
“Nah, let’s spy on a journalist.”
Sounds like the Continuity RUC is still alive and well.
Defund the police seems relevant here.
Christ! PSNI, just come clean on what you’re hiding in relation to Noah’s death??
Maybe stop spying on journalists and intimidating them out of doing their job, someone which you tramps are completely incapable of doing.
God forbid the police would bring the murderers of Noah to justice.
What has happened to the documentary he crowd funded £180k to make?
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