SQUINTER: Noah, the big story that wasn’t
Squinter
April 19, 2022 09:37
NOAH Donohoe.
If there’s one person reading this who doesn’t know that name and who isn’t familiar with the grim and tragic circumstances of the schoolboy’s death Squinter would be gobsmacked.
We’re not exactly unfamiliar with shocking death here, but the story of Noah’s six-day disappearance and its heartbreaking dénouement claims a special place in the annals of infamy, even though it’s barely two years since his naked body was found in a storm drain. And that’s remarkable because the case has managed to grip the public’s attention despite the almost total disinterest in it shown by the local media.
Squinter’s been at this game for 30 years, and while he makes no claim to be a Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, he’s been writing and editing news stories long enough to know a big one when he sees it. And if he were to sit down and try to imagine a story guaranteed to grab the attention of mainstream media – daily newspapers, TV and radio – he would be hard pushed to come up with anything more powerful. Think about it for a second…
On May 25, 2020, 46-year-old black man George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. The shocking footage of his death sparked a surge of global anger that pushed the Black Lives Matter movement to the fore of public consciousness. Protests and rallies were continuing to take place around the globe when, just three weeks later, Noah left his South Belfast home to cycle to North Belfast where he had arranged to meet some friends. It was late afternoon on Sunday, June 21. He had agreed to call his mother a short time later, but the call was never made.
As the days passed, the search for Noah grew in intensity, with ordinary people arriving from all over the city and beyond to lend a hand. Six days later his naked body was found in a storm drain just off the Shore Road, near to the Crusaders football ground.
So, in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide focus on racial violence, a mixed-race teenage boy goes missing. After six days of ceaseless and ever-mounting media coverage, he is found dead, unclothed, in a storm drain. The scene is set for the media to go to work. How did he die? Where did he go? Who saw him? Where’s the CCTV? Why was he naked. Where are his clothes? Where is his bike? Where are his backpack and laptop? There’s enough here to fill newspaper front pages and talk-show and TV slots for months to come. The appetite for information is huge.
But then something extraordinary happened. The story just kind of fizzled out. Media outlets here are no different from those anywhere else – they love nothing better than a long-running story which both engages and inflames public opinion. In the industry such a story is said to ‘have legs’ – ie, it will run and run. Stories with legs are journalist gold dust. Noah Donohoe’s story had legs like no other Belfast story I’ve seen in decades.
But the story slowed down, and then it stopped; the legs were gone, the run was over. Squinter doesn’t know why. Hasn’t a clue. Does he think journalist colleagues of his are involved in an elaborate conspiracy to hide the truth about what happened? No, of course he doesn’t. He simply makes the observation that in late June 2020 this was a massive story which for the media had ceased to be a massive story at the very time it was gathering pace.
But it’s perhaps the role of the PSNI that has furrowed Squinter’s brow most of all. A police spokesperson ruled out foul play at an extraordinarily early stage. A post-mortem found that Noah died by drowning, but a spokesperson for the family has observed that the finding “raises more questions than answers” and the inquest remains subject to delays. But it’s the police’s decision to seek a Public Interest Immunity Certificate (PIIC) in relation to information contained in three evidence files on Noah’s disappearance and death that has deepened Squinter’s concern about the case into something more akin to astonishment.
PIICs are normally used to hide police information-gathering processes and to protect informants. Squinter has no idea what the police doesn’t want the public to know about its investigation into the death of a schoolboy.
A QC for the PSNI told Coroner Joe McCriskin in December that PIICs are most often sought in relation to police “methodology”, which merely leads us to wonder what on earth the police could have been doing in their investigation of the disappearance and death of a child that they don’t want us to know about. And in making the application, the PSNI will have been fully aware of the suspicions that it would give rise to and of the further dent that it would put in already shaky public confidence in police handling of the case. But clearly they view the hiding of the information as being worth the reputational hit. And that’s quite the calculation.
(From belfastmedia)