New York City is more than a stop on the map in the book: it is a meeting place where republican politics, cultural possibility and the contested record of the Troubles come into view. Brendan Hughes visits to solicit support for the armed campaign; Dolours Price arrives with Stephen Rea and their children for a stay shaped by Rea’s theatre work; and, in the Bronx, the archive built from interviews with Hughes and Price becomes the object of a police request for evidence. These episodes give the city a recurring role as both a place of distance from the conflict and a point of connection to it.

A transatlantic political setting

After his release, Hughes travelled to America to raise morale and financial support for the armed campaign. The trip placed him before an audience far removed from the danger faced by families in Belfast and Derry. The book sets that distance against the large Irish American population, whose presence reflected generations of migration driven by poverty, famine and discrimination. Support for Irish independence could be fervent in American cities, sometimes seeming stronger there than in the places where the conflict was being fought.

New York was one point in that transatlantic network. Hughes met representatives of the Irish Northern Aid Committee, a fundraising organization. At one meeting, a benefactor urged a more expansive choice of targets, proposing that anyone associated with the British regime should be attacked. Hughes tested the logic of the proposal by asking whether it extended to postmen. The answer was yes. The exchange gives the fundraising visit a sharp edge: the distance that could sustain romantic support for armed struggle also allowed a supporter to advocate violence against people whose connection to the state was simply their uniform.

The book places this encounter within the IRA’s longer reliance on American support. America was not merely a source of money or encouragement: Hughes had obtained an Armalite rifle there years earlier. The New York meeting therefore belongs to a longer history in which political sympathy, material support and the practical reach of the campaign crossed the Atlantic, even as the consequences of violence fell most directly on people in Ireland.

A family stay and an imagined alternative

In December 1992, Price and Rea travelled to New York with their children and stayed for a couple of months while Rea performed in a Broadway play. For Price, the city suggested a life that might have taken a different shape. Her quick tongue, flaming red hair and peacock personality seemed well suited to an eccentric theatrical world; a friend imagined that, without the Troubles, she might have become a bohemian figure who moved to New York, worked in theatre and flounced around in scarves.

That possibility is not presented as a life Price actually lived, but as a counterfactual made vivid by the setting. New York offered a temporary family and theatrical context, while the political past that had shaped her remained inseparable from how others understood her. Rea resisted the idea that his character Fergus in The Crying Game was directly based on Price, while allowing that she might have influenced his interpretation. He described the film’s concern with a person remaking himself after an appalling experience. His reflections on the possibility of change and redemption echo, without resolving, the question of what a life might have been outside the conflict.

The Bronx and the subpoena

The city’s later role is concentrated in the Bronx. One chilly morning, Moloney was at home in Riverdale when a call brought news that Boston College had received a subpoena. The United States Department of Justice was relaying a request from the Police Service of Northern Ireland under a mutual legal assistance treaty with the United Kingdom. The request sought the original recordings of all interviews with Hughes and Price, in connection with an alleged murder.

The demand turned the interviews from a sealed historical record into potential evidence in a criminal investigation. Moloney and his collaborator were alarmed: while compiling the archive, they had not believed that authorities would seriously seek access to the recordings. The university was consulting lawyers, and it was not yet clear how it would respond. Moloney feared that the tapes might be handed over, leaving the interviewers and former paramilitaries who had shared their histories exposed.

From the Bronx, Moloney made the dispute public. He contacted The New York Times, which published a front-page report on the threatened subpoena, and spoke to the Boston Globe about the possibility that Boston College might have to destroy the tapes rather than surrender them. He believed public attention could help protect free speech and academic freedom. Tom Hachey, however, objected that Moloney had gone to the press without first consulting university administrators and considered his warning about destroying the archive excessive. New York thus becomes not only the site of an alarmed phone call, but also the place from which the conflict over confidentiality was pushed into public view.

Meetings, testimony and an unresolved identity

The Bronx recurs in the account of how the archive’s contents became known beyond the interviews themselves. Over several years, the narrator made periodic trips there to meet Moloney. Eventually, Moloney shared an unpublished transcript of one of his two long interviews with Price. The document ran to thirty dense, single-spaced pages, but Moloney had removed the name of the third person present at the execution of Jean McConville because that person was still alive. Price and Pat McClure were dead; the identity of the third participant remained withheld.

The transcript did not settle the matter. Anthony McIntyre had separately told the narrator that Price did not discuss McConville’s fate in her recorded interviews, but had described it to him off tape. According to the account Price gave, three people made up the death squad, and McConville was buried in an unmarked grave. Moloney and McIntyre both identified McClure as one of those present, while McIntyre said the unnamed third person fired the fatal shot. He also reported that Gerry Adams had once asked that person to become his personal driver, but the person declined. The trail ends without a name: despite the meetings and documentary clues accumulated in the Bronx, the shooter remains an Unknown.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, New York City holds different kinds of distance from the conflict. For Hughes’s audience, distance could make armed struggle easier to romanticize; for Price, the city briefly suggested a theatrical life that the Troubles had foreclosed; for Moloney, it became the setting from which an archive’s promises of secrecy faced legal challenge. The Bronx meetings also show the limits of what can be recovered: transcripts, recollections and clues sharpen the account without identifying every participant. The city’s significance lies in this recurring tension between connection and separation, and between the effort to preserve testimony and the facts that remain unresolved.