Ed Moloney

Ed Moloney was the Belfast journalist who turned a proposal to document the Troubles into the Belfast Project, an oral-history archive built around confidential interviews with former combatants. A respected reporter and editor with sources in both republican and loyalist communities, he sought testimony that ordinary academic researchers might not have been able to obtain. The archive preserved accounts that were otherwise held behind a culture of silence, but its uncertain rules and eventual exposure made Moloney’s work part of a struggle over who could speak, who could listen, and who controlled the record.

Journalism and political connections

Moloney had worked as a reporter and editor at the Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune, and had written a critical biography of Ian Paisley. His reporting had also brought him extensive contacts among republicans and loyalists. One of his most consequential connections was Gerry Adams. There had been a period when the two were friendly: while Adams was on the run, they spent a night talking in a hotel room, and Moloney slept on the floor because it was unsafe for either man to leave. Later, as Adams became more active politically in the 1980s, Moloney visited him every few months at the Sinn Féin offices on the Falls Road. Adams would make tea, and they would talk in a back room.

That relationship did not endure. Moloney came to believe that Adams was deliberately misleading the IRA rank and file. He suspected that Adams had privately decided early on to relinquish the army’s weapons in the interests of the peace process, while concealing that intention from others. The passage records this as Moloney’s conviction and suspicion, not as an established fact. The widening distance between the men also shaped Moloney’s later work: he sought out republicans who had become disillusioned with the peace process and were no longer close to Adams.

The Belfast Project’s design

The idea of recording the conflict before its participants began to die came from Paul Bew. When Bew discussed the proposal with Moloney, Moloney supplied its particular form: Boston College would collect oral histories from people who had been on the front lines. The undertaking answered a problem of access as much as one of historical preservation. The IRA remained illegal, and admitting membership could expose a participant to prosecution. Former militants also risked being branded a tout—an informer—and informers could be killed. A promise that interviews would be preserved for posterity was not, by itself, enough to persuade people accustomed to distrust.

Moloney proposed that former paramilitaries interview other former paramilitaries. The approach made the interviewer’s shared experience and political proximity a means of gaining trust, rather than relying on graduate students unfamiliar to their subjects. Anthony McIntyre, himself a former IRA man, conducted interviews in the republican community; Wilson McArthur handled the loyalist community. The method produced intimate testimony, but it also made the archive dependent on relationships, assurances, and understandings that were not always shared by the people involved.

For several years, McIntyre worked cautiously. He used encrypted email to communicate with Moloney, tried to leave as little paper trail as possible, and carried a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack as he travelled around Belfast and beyond. Participants were interviewed more than once; sessions with each person could total ten hours or more. After the interviews were complete, a trusted typist transcribed them. The recordings and transcripts were then posted to Boston College, where Bob O’Neill stored them in the Treasure Room at the Burns Library.

One of the most important participants was Brendan Hughes, a former IRA man whom McIntyre had first met in prison in 1974. Their closeness gave the conversations an easy, intimate quality. Both men had become disillusioned with the peace process and had broken with Adams and Sinn Féin. In the archive, Hughes was identified by the code name C. Before his death, he asked McIntyre and Moloney to promise that his recollections would be published as a book. Moloney later used Hughes’s transcript, together with that of David Ervine, a loyalist politician and former Ulster Volunteer Force paramilitary who had also died, to write Voices from the Grave. Published in 2010, it was presented by O’Neill and Tom Hachey as the first planned publication drawn from the archive.

Secrecy, access, and competing expectations

The publication exposed how unsettled the project’s arrangements had been. Wilson McArthur had understood that none of the interviews would be made public until every participant had died; Moloney’s plan to publish Voices from the Grave after the first participants had died, rather than waiting until the last had died, surprised him. Access was similarly unclear. The project had referred to future Boston College students, yet the history department had not known that the archive existed. When a professor arranged for a doctoral student to consult the Hughes and Ervine interviews, Moloney objected and urged that the archive be closed to further access under a strict protocol.

A later newspaper story created another dispute about what the archive contained. When the Sunday Life article suggested that a journalist had accessed the Boston College materials, Moloney rejected the implication that the archive had been opened to her. He also stated that Dolours Price had not named Jean McConville in her recorded interviews with McIntyre, because McIntyre had warned her against doing so. This distinction mattered as questions arose about the source and timing of accounts concerning McConville’s disappearance: the children remembered her being taken on the evening after an earlier beating, and believed the abduction occurred on 7 December 1972, though they could not be certain of the date.

The confidentiality problem was not simply a later surprise. While preparing the participant contracts in early 2001, Moloney sent proposed wording to O’Neill and suggested that Boston College’s lawyers review it. O’Neill replied that he was working on the wording and would consult the lawyers, but the contracts participants signed did not specify that confidentiality could not necessarily withstand a court order. No Boston College lawyer reviewed the agreements. The archive’s protective promise therefore lacked a clear qualification about the possibility of compulsory disclosure.

Subpoenas and the limits of protection

The legal challenge arrived while Moloney was at home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Boston College had received a subpoena following a request from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, conveyed by the United States Department of Justice under a mutual legal assistance treaty with the United Kingdom. The request concerned an alleged murder and demanded the original recordings of all interviews with Hughes and Price. Moloney feared that the recordings might be handed over quietly. He contacted the New York Times, which published a front-page story about the secret archive, and spoke to the Boston Globe, raising the possibility that Boston College might have to destroy the tapes rather than surrender them.

Moloney framed the dispute as a matter of free speech and academic freedom, and believed that public attention might pressure Boston College to defend the project. Hachey rebuked him for going to the press without first consulting the college’s administrators and called his suggestion about destroying the archive excessive. The collaborators’ shared sense of facing the same fight did not last: after a conference call and a few further emails, Hachey and O’Neill did not speak again with their Belfast Project partners. Before the end of May, Boston College turned over Hughes’s interviews on the grounds that he had died and that much of his account was already public. The material supplied was unredacted, unlike Voices from the Grave, which had been edited to shield certain identities for legal and security reasons. Moloney protested that the authorities now possessed information on which they could act.

Further interviews and an exposed archive

After Allison Morris interviewed Price at her home in Malahide in February 2010, Moloney visited her in Dublin. He proposed a separate, more detailed interview, promising not to release her account until after her death. They spoke for several hours. When they parted, he assured her that he would protect what she had said and took the tapes back to America for storage in the Treasure Room. Although these interviews were not technically part of the Belfast Project, Moloney placed them in the same archive in an attempt to keep them safe.

That choice proved consequential. In July 2013, two detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland travelled to Boston College to collect material authorised by a judge. Moloney pleaded with O’Neill not to include his Price interviews, but the subpoenas were broad enough for the college to surrender them along with the other material. The following spring, Gerry Adams was arrested in connection with the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. The book’s account does not reduce that arrest to a single cause; it shows instead how interviews, subpoenas, and police access had made the archive part of the case’s public and legal aftermath.

Moloney’s record-making continued to carry risk even after the archive became public. Years later, he shared with the book’s author an unpublished transcript of one of his two long interviews with Price. The document ran to thirty dense, single-spaced pages. Before handing it over, Moloney removed the name of a third executioner said to have been at McConville’s grave because that person was still alive. The decision echoed the project’s central tension: preserving testimony could serve historical inquiry, while disclosing it could expose living people to consequences. Moloney’s work made the silence surrounding the Troubles harder to maintain, but it could not guarantee that the voices he recorded would remain protected or that their eventual use would match the expectations under which they had spoken.