MI5 Faces Tribunal Over Illegal Spying on BBC Reporter

(MENAFN) British intelligence agency MI5 conducted unlawful surveillance on Irish journalist Vincent Kearney for eight years, his lawyers told a London tribunal this week — allegations that have cast a harsh spotlight on the systematic targeting of Irish reporters by British authorities.

Kearney was monitored by MI5, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), and London’s Metropolitan Police between 2006 and 2014, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) heard — a special court established to investigate complaints against Britain’s intelligence agencies.

According to his lawyers, MI5 illegally obtained Kearney’s phone records, while the PSNI and Metropolitan Police harvested “geographic data” from more than 1,500 of his text messages to construct a “detailed intelligence profile” encompassing his personal relationships and family members’ home addresses. MI5 acknowledged last year that it had accessed Kearney’s phone records, but insisted agents did so only twice — in 2006 and 2009.

Kearney served as BBC Northern Ireland correspondent from 2006 to 2019 and currently holds the role of Northern Ireland Editor at RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster. His first BBC report in 2006 covered the murder of Denis Donaldson, an MI5 informer embedded within the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Before that year was out, an MI5 agent had already filed an internal request to “open a file” on Kearney, the tribunal heard.

The BBC issued a firm statement in support of Kearney this week: “What happened in this instance was wrong and must never be repeated. The independence of what we do is hard won and it’s something that we will fight to protect.”

The broadcaster’s backing, however, is complicated by its own history — MI5 vetted all BBC journalists from 1937 through the 1980s, a program only publicly acknowledged after it was exposed by the Observer in 1985. The BBC claimed the vetting was “scaled back” — but notably not abolished — in response to that revelation.

Kearney’s case is not without precedent. In a landmark 2024 ruling, the IPT found that the PSNI and Metropolitan Police had broken the law by surveilling investigative journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, who had produced a documentary exposing collusion between British police and Loyalist terrorists in the murders of six Catholic men in Northern Ireland.

Both Birney and McCaffrey told the tribunal they have “no doubt” that the UK is still actively targeting Irish reporters — a claim that lends urgent weight to the broader pattern of surveillance now before the court.

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