Anthony McIntyre

Anthony McIntyre, known as Mackers, moved from the Provisional IRA and seventeen years in prison to academic study and oral history. As a principal interviewer for Boston College’s Belfast Project, he sought testimony from former republicans who had reasons to distrust both the authorities and their former political leadership. His work preserved accounts otherwise held behind a code of silence, but the project’s promise of confidentiality was vulnerable to legal demands. McIntyre’s own later exposure to a subpoena made that vulnerability personal: the interviewer, too, had become a witness whose words might be used against him.

Identity and Background

McIntyre grew up in South Belfast. At sixteen, he lied about his age and joined the Provisional IRA. He was imprisoned for the murder of a loyalist paramilitary and served seventeen years. Prison did not end his education: after becoming tired of reading the Bible, he developed an interest in learning. Released in 1992, he eventually earned an honours undergraduate degree at Queen’s University Belfast, then completed a doctorate on the republican movement under the supervision of Paul Bew. He had never finished secondary school before prison, making the path from teenage recruit to historian a marked change in both occupation and vantage point.

The degree did not lead to secure employment. For a time after his release, McIntyre resorted to shoplifting. In 2000 he met Carrie Twomey, an American student in Belfast; they fell in love, married, and had two children. His life after prison therefore combined intellectual achievement with economic difficulty and family commitments, rather than offering a simple passage from armed struggle to a settled academic career.

McIntyre spoke both the language of the university and the street. Ed Moloney had first encountered him at a republican funeral in 1993, and McIntyre later became one of Moloney’s sources. That combination of experience and scholarly training made him a natural candidate to interview former combatants: he could approach them as someone familiar with the movement’s world, while also undertaking the work of recording and interpreting it.

Interviewer for the Belfast Project

The Belfast Project began with a problem of trust. Even after the peace process had helped normalize Sinn Féin as a political party, the IRA remained illegal, and acknowledging membership could expose a former paramilitary to prosecution. Speaking about paramilitary activity could also bring the label of tout, an informer, and the danger that accompanied it. Moloney concluded that former combatants might be more willing to speak to another former paramilitary than to a team of graduate students. McIntyre was chosen to conduct republican interviews; Wilson McArthur conducted interviews in the loyalist community. The project was supported by a $200,000 grant to Boston College in 2001. An idea to include police testimony was eventually abandoned.

McIntyre’s interviews were designed to elicit accounts that public political narratives and ordinary research methods might not reach. Over several years, he sought out republicans who had become disillusioned with the peace process or had fallen out of proximity to Gerry Adams. He communicated with Moloney using encrypted email and tried to leave as little paper trail as possible. Carrying a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack, he travelled around Belfast and beyond to meet interviewees. He commonly returned to each person for multiple sittings, spending ten hours or more with them in total. Once the interviews were complete, a trusted typist transcribed them; McIntyre then sent both recordings and transcripts to Boston College.

The interviews were not impersonal depositions. McIntyre’s prior relationships with some participants shaped the conditions in which they spoke. He had first met Brendan Hughes in prison in 1974, and the two were close. Hughes, disillusioned with the peace process and separated from Adams and Sinn Féin, spoke in the archive under the code name C. The friendship gave their conversations an easy-going, intimate quality, while also underscoring that an interviewer’s access arose from personal history as well as research technique.

At Boston College, librarian Bob O’Neill stored the material in the Treasure Room of the Burns Library, described as its most secure part. Yet the recordings’ physical security could not resolve the central problem: interviewees had spoken on the understanding that their testimony would remain unavailable during their lifetimes, while the IRA’s internal culture continued to make disclosure politically and personally dangerous. In a Northern Ireland where Adams still refused to acknowledge ever having been in the IRA, McIntyre’s project challenged a political climate in which former members could not easily know whether speaking was safe.

Confidentiality and the Subpoena Fight

The project’s confidentiality arrangements were contested not only by courts but by differing expectations among its architects. McArthur understood that none of the interviews would be released until every participant had died. Moloney, however, planned to publish Voices from the Grave a few years after the final interviews, which would reveal the archive’s existence after some participants had died, rather than waiting for all of them. The difference exposed an ambiguity at the project’s foundation: a general promise of secrecy had not produced a shared understanding of when testimony could become public.

When a subpoena threatened the archive, McIntyre protested that total confidentiality and protection had been central reasons participants trusted the project. In an emergency conference call with Moloney, McArthur, Tom Hachey, and O’Neill, the project’s architects discussed how to respond. The college’s president, William Leahy, had assured Hachey that the interviewers and interviews would not be compromised. McArthur recalled that Boston College representatives had used the word ironclad when they first discussed the archive, and that he had repeated that assurance to wary participants, telling them the college’s legal counsel had reviewed the arrangements.

That assurance was not supported by the contract’s history. While preparing the participant agreements in early 2001, Moloney sent proposed wording to O’Neill and suggested that it be referred to the college’s legal staff. O’Neill replied that he was working on the language and would consult the lawyers. In the end, no lawyer reviewed the agreements. The contracts also lacked a qualification explaining that confidentiality could not necessarily withstand a court order. The gap between what interviewers had told participants and what the documents could promise became a practical and ethical crisis once authorities sought the recordings.

Moloney proposed sending the archive by overnight courier to McIntyre in Ireland, arguing that Boston College had a moral obligation to honour its commitment even if doing so might obstruct justice. McIntyre agreed that the participants had risked their lives by entrusting their stories to the project. His position placed the promise to interviewees against the demands of the law, rather than treating the archive as ordinary university property. He and Moloney took their case to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and lost, though they obtained a stay preventing the material’s transfer while they sought further appeal. In spring 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case.

When a second subpoena sought material relating to Jean McConville’s abduction and murder, the interviews’ alphabetic code names complicated the search. Boston College’s records did not identify subjects by name, but McIntyre knew whom he had interviewed and might have been able to identify who discussed McConville. Judge William Young asked him for help. McIntyre declined, unwilling to assist in identifying the relevant interviewees. The legal battle thus tested the project’s confidentiality at its most consequential point: whether the interviewer would use his personal knowledge to help the court locate testimony.

In July 2013, two detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland travelled to Boston to retrieve the material authorized by Judge Young. Moloney’s interviews with Dolours Price were not formally part of the Belfast Project, but the university handed them over along with the subpoenaed collection. The following spring, Gerry Adams was arrested in relation to McConville’s abduction and murder. The episode showed how broadly drawn demands could endanger material beyond the project’s formal boundaries, even as its creators tried to protect it.

From Interviewer to Subject

McIntyre also objected publicly to the prosecution of Stephen Rea. He questioned how the truth about the Troubles could emerge if authorities charged people with murder for speaking about it, describing the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s approach as one of “prosecuting truth, rather than procuring truth.” The phrase captured his concern that criminal investigation might suppress testimony as well as obtain evidence. His criticism did not mean that he had only collected other people’s accounts: he had recorded an oral history of his own.

In April 2016, while at home in Drogheda, McIntyre received an email from a Boston lawyer informing him that Boston College had been served with a subpoena seeking his Belfast Project interview. Authorities alleged his involvement in a range of offences, including membership in a paramilitary organization, possession of an imitation firearm while in prison in 1978, and participation in an operation involving a pipe bomb in Belfast. McIntyre feared that his own account of years in a banned organization could be turned into evidence against him. The interviewer who had spent years recording other people’s exposure to prosecution now faced a demand for his own testimony.

Memory, Silence, and Unresolved Allegations

McIntyre’s work unfolded amid competing claims over who could speak for republican history. Sinn Féin leaders portrayed critics such as McIntyre as dissidents or opponents of the peace process. The party, which had inherited the IRA’s capacity for internal discipline, sought to preserve a consistent account of the conflict; a scholar described this as a monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle. To McIntyre and other critics, that discipline could appear self-interested and cruel. Yet a Villiers report offered a counterpoint: the continuing cohesion of republican and loyalist groups after ceasefires had helped leaders influence and restrain members, potentially supporting the transition from violence to political progress. The same structures that narrowed room for dissent could also help prevent a return to conflict.

The book places McIntyre’s interviews within this unresolved tension. Belfast’s bustling centre, chain stores, film studios, and Troubles Tour could make the conflict seem like distant history, while the old suspicions remained active. The archive sought to give future readers access to voices that official or party narratives could not contain, but it could not guarantee that speaking would be safe, that testimony would be complete, or that competing memories would converge. McIntyre’s contribution is therefore both historical and procedural: he created conditions for former combatants to speak, and his resistance to disclosure defended their expectation of secrecy, even as that secrecy limited what the public could know.

That dilemma remains visible in a 2018 conversation at a restaurant on the River Boyne. The author told McIntyre and Carrie that he believed Marian Price had shot McConville. McIntyre acknowledged that he had previously recounted an offer from Adams but would not confirm or deny that Marian was the shooter. Carrie reminded the author that Marian had been maid of honour at her and McIntyre’s wedding; she and McIntyre also raised Marian’s poor health and the possible effects of publication on her adult children. The exchange did not resolve the allegation. Instead, it showed how intimate loyalties, uncertainty, family consequences, and the demand for historical disclosure continued to meet in the choices McIntyre made about what to say.