Voices from the Grave

Voices from the Grave is a 2010 book by Ed Moloney, built from the Boston College oral-history transcripts of Brendan Hughes and David Ervine. It transformed a confidential archive into a public intervention: Hughes named Gerry Adams in allegations about Irish Republican Army operations, while the book’s publication exposed how fragile the project’s promises of secrecy were once testimony entered an institutional collection.

Origins and Design

Moloney’s proposal was more specific than the broad idea of documenting the Troubles: Boston College would record combatants speaking about their experiences. The obstacles were not merely logistical. The Irish Republican Army remained an illegal organisation, so admitting membership could invite prosecution; within paramilitary circles, violating the rule of silence could bring the stigma of informing and the threat of being killed. In that climate, a conventional academic interviewer might not earn the confidence of former gunmen.

The project’s answer was to ask former paramilitaries to interview others. Anthony McIntyre, known as Mackers, became the republican interviewer. Having joined the Provos as a teenager and served seventeen years in prison, he was not an outsider with a notebook but a former combatant whose background could make candid testimony more possible. Moloney and Boston College librarian Bob O’Neill met him at Deanes, a seafood restaurant in central Belfast, in the summer of 2000 to discuss the project.

The intended safeguard was a posthumous release: interviews would remain sealed until the participant had died, protecting the living from prosecution and from reprisals by former comrades. McIntyre later communicated with Moloney by encrypted email, carried a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack, and interviewed participants over several sittings, sometimes spending ten hours or more with each. A trusted typist transcribed the recordings, which McIntyre sent with the transcripts to O’Neill at Boston College’s Burns Library. Participants were identified in the materials sent to the college by letters rather than names; their identities were linked to those codes in separate signed contracts.

Hughes’s Testimony and the Book

One interviewee, identified in the archive as C, was Brendan Hughes. McIntyre had known him since they met in prison in 1974. Their closeness gave the interviews an intimate quality, and Hughes, like McIntyre, had become deeply disillusioned with the peace process and had broken with Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin. Before his death, Hughes asked McIntyre and Moloney to ensure that his recollections would be published as a book.

Moloney used Hughes’s transcript alongside that of David Ervine, a loyalist politician and former member of the Ulster Volunteer Force who had also died. Published in 2010, Voices from the Grave was presented by Boston College’s Bob O’Neill and Tom Hachey as the first volume in a planned series drawn from the college’s oral-history archive. Its appearance made the archive’s existence public and gave Hughes’s testimony a named, book-length audience.

Hughes alleged that Adams had been an Irish Republican Army commander and had personally ordered murders. He said Adams sent him to the United States to obtain Armalite rifles, sent Dolours Price to bomb London, and ordered the killing of Jean McConville. These were claims made in Hughes’s recorded account, not uncontested findings. Adams rejected the suggestion that he had played a part in the McConville case or in the other allegations promoted by Moloney. He also argued that Hughes had been unwell, including during the period when he gave the interviews, and had opposed the peace process. Sinn Féin characterized Belfast Project participants as having a malign agenda.

Reception and Reprisal

The book drew substantial attention and strong reviews, but its revelations also brought a sharp political response. McIntyre was identified as Hughes’s interviewer, and threats followed. In one incident, someone smeared a neighbour’s house with excrement, apparently having gone to the wrong address. A press report quoted an unnamed republican threatening that McIntyre would meet the fate of Eamon Collins, who had been stabbed to death after publishing a memoir about life in the Irish Republican Army. The intimidation made plain the danger that the project’s original promise of delayed disclosure was meant to address.

Moloney went on a book tour and planned a documentary for Irish television that would include audio from Hughes’s interview. In the summer of 2010, Danny Morrison, a longtime ally of Adams and a former Irish Republican Army propagandist, asked Boston College for access to the Hughes tapes. Moloney and McIntyre opposed releasing them. Their objection underscored a distinction the book’s publication had made newly consequential: a printed, edited account was not the same as opening the underlying recordings and transcripts to others.

Confidentiality and the Archive

The project’s assurances proved less secure than participants had been led to believe. In early 2001, while preparing participant contracts, Moloney sent proposed wording to O’Neill and suggested that Boston College’s lawyers review it. O’Neill said he would consult the university’s lawyers, but no lawyer ultimately reviewed the agreements. The signed contracts promised confidentiality without stating that a court order might compel disclosure. Although loyalist interviewer Wilson McArthur had described the guarantee to participants as ironclad, that assurance had not received the legal review he said it had.

After the Police Service of Northern Ireland obtained the Hughes materials, Moloney learned that the transcripts and recordings handed over were unredacted. This contrasted with Voices from the Grave, which had been carefully edited to protect certain identities for legal and security reasons. The book therefore occupied an unstable boundary: it fulfilled Hughes’s request to publish his recollections after death, but its appearance also revealed the archive and did not prevent the original, less-protected materials from reaching the authorities. In the surrounding account of the project, that contradiction is central to the book’s significance: testimony gathered to preserve a hidden past could become both public history and evidence vulnerable to legal compulsion.