Meejit on "scoops"

Usually a journalist likes having a story to him or herself. If it's of sufficient potential interest, it's a "scoop".

But when the story is based on material that is, or easily could be, in the public domain, and has earned no more than a disdainful sniff from the rest of the media hounds, a journalist starts to worry that the story is maybe not much of a story after all, and maybe he has (that is to say "I have") got it wrong.

When the Pitstop Ploughshares hammered that plane in Shannon 42 months ago, I knew Ciaron O'Reilly slightly. I had been one of more than 1,000 people who heard him speak in a public meeting and were amazed at his articulacy and commitment; then there were tens of thousands more who saw him profiled on TV's Would You Believe?

I wrote with sympathetic interest about the Shannon action in my next Irish Times column, then watched in despair as no other mainstream journalist did so for three-and-a-half years. (Now that the action has been deemed legal in court, a tiny few have joined me. But the morality of the action stands, or falls, quite separate from its legality.) Meeting the other four plane-whackers, when they were eventually released from remand, confirmed the story's attractions. All five are smart, complex, good-looking – and are such diverse "types" that Louis Walsh might have assembled them. One of them is American for God's sake.

Lonely at the top

Most of the thousands of words I proceeded to write about them appeared in "alternative" media. The five have been fixtures on indymedia.ie. Village has run interviews and reports that proved the "sub judice" bogeyman would not eat you up if you went near them. And yet other reporters stayed away. When you bought Village last week and read the report by William Hederman and me, you were reading, I believe, the only two established professional journalists who had bothered to attend much of the trial. (As it happens, neither of us was being paid to do so.)

With the "not guilty" verdict the local interest jumped only a little. An Irish story that made papers from Texas to South Africa and was rather big news in Australia barely cracked the front-pages of the Dublin dailies. (Daily Ireland, from Belfast, and the Cork-based Irish Examiner took more interest.) The pundit-likes of Ian O'Doherty, who had never paid a blind bit of notice to the moral or legal arguments, pronounced the verdict "baffling" and a legal licence to "[take] a hammer to some hippie's car".

Only the Star presented the legal argument cogently. On radio, Dublin's NewsTalk 106 got in a barrister who seemingly hadn't followed the case to speak irrelevantly about "self-defence", and presenter Ger Gilroy said "the jury had taken it upon themselves" to send a political message. Worse yet, panellist Henry McKean insisted "they did commit a crime", as did Emer O'Kelly in the Sunday Independent – both apparently immune to what "not guilty" means and to worries about libel.

Notwithstanding his nerdy reputation, Matt Cooper erred repeatedly over the case's legal and historical detail in his Sunday Times column.

Pitstop the presses

Touchingly, the Sun contacted ex-defendant Deirdre Clancy for her views on the bog Psalter, "eerily" revealed on the day of the acquittal and, uh, having nothing to do with Israel.

But the trial had thrown up other much more interesting stories: how Karen Fallon had carried that big "Hammered by the Irish" inflatable in the hopes it might dissuade any armed security from shooting-first-etc; how soft-spoken, plain-speaking US activist Kathy Kelly gave the Ploughshares those photos of bombed Iraqi children that ended up in a hangar-side shrine; how prosecuting barrister Conor Devally summed up his case with an anti-war speech that warned that we could nonetheless never tolerate people like the defendants taking the law into their own hands.

Less dramatically, but crucially, there was the expert witness on logistics, an ex-RAF officer, who explained that it might be reasonable to think that taking-out one transport plane would have a life-saving effect down the line.

Nothing "baffling" about that. With that testimony, and the fact that three charter companies diverted their troop flights away from Shannon after the action, you might conclude that Mary Kelly and the Shannon Five performed the most truly effective anti-war acts by anyone, anywhere, who wasn't wearing a military uniform or a politician's suit.

And that's what I call a story.