Friday, 16th April 2021 at 2:38 pm
The line between war and unlawful killing gets richly explored in BBC Two’s upcoming drama, Danny Boy.
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Starring Toby Jones and Anthony Boyle, it centres on the events following the Battle of Danny Boy in Southern Iraq in 2004 and severely questions the clash between duty and morals.
Written by Robert Jones and directed by Sam Miller, its debut is already highly anticipated.
Here’s all we know about Danny Boy so far…
When does Danny Boy air on BBC Two?
Good news – there’s not long to wait to watch Danny Boy on BBC Two, as BBC spokespeople have confirmed the 90-minute one-off drama will air this spring.
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Simon Akam Scribe, £25
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The British Army, according to journalist Simon Akam, went into the ‘wars of choice’ in Iraq and Afghanistan convinced that it was ‘the best little army in the world’. It came out of them, he says, with its reputation diminished, both in its own estimation but also – and importantly – in the view of our American allies whom, embarrassingly, we had hubristically denigrated at the start of the Iraq operation.
There is little doubt that ultimately the British military failed badly in Iraq by ceding control of Basra, in 2007, to the sectarian Shia militias that we had hitherto been fighting.
Various shyster lawyers represented the phoney claimants but rigorous re-examinations found no murderers or torturers in our uniform. Eventually the Law Society struck off persistent persecutor Phil Shiner who had hounded hundreds of veterans (all exonerated) and written copiously for The Guardian.
Now the Police Service of Northern Ireland has re-opened the hounding of 12 veterans who served there, even though they are all now very elderly, some in frail health, and all have already been investigated once – with a finding of “no case to answer”.
And still the hounding of veterans goes on. For the record, 722 servicemen were murdered over there. Prosecutions of known IRA gunmen by the PSNI – zero.
The case of Phil Shiner
The government often cites the case of Phil Shiner, the British lawyer who successfully exposed the role of British soldiers in the torture and murder of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi man who died in British custody in Basra in 2003.
Shiner was struck off by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in 2017 after being found guilty of professional misconduct charges including paying an Iraqi middleman to find claimants to make allegations against British soldiers.
Shiner had submitted thousands of claims against the British army so this was the opportunity the government - having previously denounced law firms involved in litigation