Noah Donohoe Episode 5: The Prison Confession

We tracked down the alleged suspect, the alleged murderer.

He denied being involved in any which way connected to pedophile hunters.

He said there was a dispute maybe over a girl.

And we brought all this evidence to the PS9, to the coroner.

And it was such an explosive claim that the family, in a pre-inquest hearing in June 2021, demanded that the coroner and the PS9 take this seriously and investigate it.

Six months later, The P.S. and I came to the then coroner, Joe McCrisken, to say that they'd investigated the claim and found that there was no merit to it.

But, you know, one wonders just how seriously they did interrogate it, because there's a sense throughout this entire investigation the P.S. and I have been incurious, reluctant to explore the alternative theories other than Noah voluntarily went into the storm drain, voluntarily stripped himself naked.

and was effectively the architect of all his own actions and consequences.

Yeah, and I think, and again, we've got the benefit of significant hindsight, but also of significant private investigation that you and others and myself have undertaken, which in many respects reinforces the concerns about third party involvement.

And you have to consider there is also the PII and the information that has been withheld from the investigation for apparent security reasons.

And let me explain PII's, Public Interest Immunity Certificates, or certificates withdrawing or redacting documents from the public view.

PII's are normally associated with terror cases, highly, you know, international terrorism, MI5, MI6 cases.

It's just an ordinary missing persons case the police have told us for six years, and yet 300 documents were redacted from the coroner's file on the basis of national... security, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland withdrew that and signed a statement.

And it was quite extraordinary.

Noah's family, Fiona, fought a battle against this.

They brought thousands, literally thousands onto the street to protest.

And Niall Murphy, who I've spoken to regularly, and of course, nearly every day during at some stages in this investigation, he was the family lawyer.

A public interest immunity certificate is the mechanism by which the state holds on to its secrets.

If material is deemed disclosable, that it is relevant to legal proceedings and the state, for purposes of generally national security, make a decision that they want to preserve that document and not disclose it in circumstances where they should and where the court would order that they should.

The legal process by which they maintain the secrecy around that document is to apply PII to it, that is public interest immunity.

And one has to recall that an inquest, one of the purposes of an inquest, not only is to inquire into the circumstances of the death, but it is also to allay rumour and suspicion.

I can't conceal my disgust and my despair that the authorities would seek to invoke such an extreme measure that is rarely engaged but for the protection of national security in the case of a missing child.

It is beyond belief.

So in relation to the PI, what could be the reasons for these documents? You know as well as I do, this is Northern Ireland.

It's a whispering city.