Ed Moloney and Dolours Price

Ed Moloney and Dolours Price’s relationship as interviewer and witness centered on a confidential recording that she agreed would remain sealed until her death. In conversations conducted apart from the Belfast Project interviews Price had given to Anthony McIntyre, she described her participation in the disappearance and killing of Jean McConville. Moloney promised to protect the account and placed the recordings in the Boston College archive; when investigators later obtained them, a historical testimony intended for eventual release became material in a live criminal investigation.

A separate interview under a promise of secrecy

The Belfast Project was conceived as an oral history in which former combatants could speak candidly about their experiences, with their testimony withheld until after their deaths. Fear of prosecution and of being branded an informer made such assurances central to recruiting participants. Moloney’s broader proposal also recognized that former militants might be more willing to speak to someone who had once belonged to their world than to academic researchers they regarded as outsiders.

Price had already spent about fifteen hours speaking with McIntyre for the Belfast Project, but those recorded conversations did not mention McConville. This distinction later mattered: the archive contained another set of recordings made by Moloney himself. After Allison Morris interviewed Price at her home in Malahide in February 2010, Moloney visited her in Dublin and proposed a more detailed account of her past, to be safeguarded on the same posthumous terms. The separate interview was not technically part of the Belfast Project, although Moloney ultimately stored it with that archive.

The interviews and Price’s account

Price agreed while staying at St Patrick’s Hospital, where she was being treated for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. During one morning visit, she and Moloney spoke for several hours in her room. A few days later they met in a rented flat outside the hospital, where a small camera crew filmed their conversation. The book describes Price as sober and coherent in both encounters. She discussed her aunt Bridie’s injuries after an accident at an Irish Republican Army arms dump, and said that the family’s mourning and the restrictions imposed afterward helped drive her toward the struggle. She also recalled being beaten at Burntollet Bridge, joining the Irish Republican Army, and later joining the Unknowns.

Asked about the practice of secretly disposing of people, Price said she had not believed in it. She described volunteers discussing whether the practice was wise, but being told that it was how things were done. She also called it a war crime and said that she had advocated leaving bodies in public as a deterrent. Her account therefore presented both participation and unease: she had carried out orders, but later judged the method criminal and recalled having questioned it among other volunteers.

Price said she had helped disappear people before she was ordered to take McConville across the border. She claimed that she had not previously known McConville, or even known of her, and maintained that McConville had confessed to informing for money. Price described a transmitter found at McConville’s flat and a separate identification at a barracks on Hastings Street. According to her account, McConville watched Irish Republican Army men through a slit in a blanket; one volunteer recognized her slippers. Price said McConville admitted being an informer when questioned. These details were Price’s claims, not independent confirmation of the accusation.

From transport to the killing

Price’s account went beyond driving McConville across the border. She said that after McConville had been held for four or five days, Price and others were called back to Dundalk. A local unit had dug a grave, but its members did not want to carry out the killing; Price thought this reluctance arose because McConville was a woman. When Moloney pressed her on what followed, Price fell silent before acknowledging what happened. She identified three people present: herself, Pat McClure, and another volunteer.

The three had only one gun. Price said they decided each would fire so that none could be certain who had delivered the fatal shot, a collective arrangement that obscured individual responsibility without eliminating it. Price fired and deliberately missed. One of the others then fired, and McConville fell. Price said they left her in the hole and the local Dundalk unit sealed the grave. Her testimony thus made her role concrete while distinguishing her own shot from the shot that killed McConville.

Memory, responsibility, and the archive

After several hours, Moloney and Price parted with his assurance that he would protect what she had told him. He took the recordings back to America and deposited them in the most secure part of the Boston College archive, the Treasure Room. The promise reflected the project’s original logic: participants could speak while alive, while the sealed testimony would not expose them to prosecution or reprisals from former comrades. But the protection was not as secure as the arrangement implied. When Moloney prepared participant contracts in 2001, the agreements did not qualify confidentiality by warning that a court order might compel disclosure, and Boston College’s lawyers never reviewed them.

In July 2013, two detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland travelled to Boston to collect material authorized for release by a judge. Although Moloney’s interviews with Price were not formally part of the Belfast Project, the subpoenas were broad enough for the university to hand them over with the other recordings. Moloney had asked Bob O’Neill not to include them. Their transfer placed Price’s testimony within a police investigation; the following spring, Gerry Adams was arrested in connection with McConville’s abduction and murder, forty-one years earlier. The sequence linked Moloney’s promise to protect Price’s account with a consequence he had sought to prevent: the archive became accessible to investigators before its intended posthumous release.

Price’s later reflections, as recorded by Moloney, returned to the people whose lives had been taken or ruined by the organization’s actions. She said that those experiences came back to her and that she sometimes prayed for the dead. She also described having acted against her nature and only later having time to consider questions she had not asked in the heat of events. The interviews preserve that tension without resolving it: Price’s confession supplies an unusually specific account of her participation, while her assertions about McConville’s informing and the roles of others remain claims whose evidentiary status is distinct from the fact that she made them. Moloney’s recording is therefore both a personal act of testimony and part of the archive’s contested passage from confidential history into legal scrutiny.