It was one of the most famous days in Irish football history and it should have been a day of joy and celebration as Ireland secured a 1-0 victory against Italy in the 1994 World Cup. Tragically, June 18th of that year will also be remembered as the anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, the Loughinisland massacre. No Stone Unturned is a new film by Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney that delves into that story and unearths answers that have been buried for over twenty years. He joined Dave Fanning on The Ryan Tubridy Show to remember the day and to talk about revelations he has found while researching the film.
"A number of people in a small country town called Loughinisland in County Down were watching the World Cup and Ireland was playing Italy in New York… A couple of men burst into the bar when everyone's backs were turned and opened fire, killing six and wounding a number of others. It was a horrific massacre just prior to the ceasefire and it was particularly hard to understand because there were so many innocents in the bar and also it happened in a tiny county town so far away from the heart of much of the violence in Derry and Belfast."
Originally, Alex began to work on the story for a short film for ESPN but when that was finished, he found he couldn't let the story go.
"When I met the families of the victims, I was so touched by their determination to find out the truth. They felt that something else was going on. They felt that the crime should have been solved and wasn't, so their search for the truth and their determination to find it really moved me and so I began to dig into it in a more powerful way to see if we could find out what had really happened, if there had been a cover up."
Alex was pretty shocked by what he found once he started digging up the past, describing it as a "slam dunk case".
"They found the getaway car. It was full of evidence. They found the murder weapon. They found DNA evidence. The getaway car as it happened was just a hundred yards or so from the family home of one of the key suspects so they seemingly had everything they needed… It was just staggering to believe that they couldn't have brought anybody to justice…”
Alex and his team were passionate about aiding the families of victims in their long search for the truth and it wasn't long before they stumbled upon those long-sought answers.
"I was actually surprised that we were able to get to what I think is the bottom of it. We name the key suspects… We found the trail of police investigations and how they had all those suspects in custody with a confession at least form one and did nothing about it. We went pretty far, obviously we were enormously aided by the Police Ombudsman's report which came out fairly recently but we went beyond it to be able, in this case, to name people because it was something so horrific. It seemed important and served the public interest to point out who these people were because as it turns out they're still living not very far away from Louglinisland."
No Stone Unturned is due for release in cinemas across Ireland from November 10th.
Click here for the full interview.