Invisible Republicans

Tucking into a carvery lunch in a Dublin hotel, Ed Moloney seems remarkably relaxed for a man whose latest book has reportedly provoked threats from pissed-off republicans. Based on interviews done as part of a Boston College oral history project on the Northern Ireland conflict, Voices from the Grave traces the history of the Troubles through the testimonies of former IRA man Brendan Hughes and UVF bomber-turned-politician David Ervine. Needless to say, certain individuals would prefer the book had never been published.

“Of course we were aware of the threats,” the 62-year-old journalist and author says. “We’ve been hearing them from the drumbeats in Belfast more or less ever since the book came out. And they were coming from the sort of sources that you have to take seriously. So we knew we had to do something. I did an interview with the Irish News in Belfast last week, pointing out that we knew exactly where it was coming from and fingers would be pointed if anything did happen. So hopefully that will have nipped it in the bud.”
His calm demeanour could be explained by the fact that the threats – real or otherwise – seem to be mainly directed towards the book’s researcher and interviewer, Anthony McIntyre. As an award-winning journalist who’s been reporting on Northern Ireland since the early ‘70s, Moloney – who now lives in New York – feels relatively safe.
“They know that the archive has lots of other interviews in it and they’d be obviously interested to know what’s in them and who has spoken to Boston College. And there’s every possibility that Anthony McIntyre could be kidnapped and that information would be extracted from him. As for me, they’re not stupid. Some of them may not like me, but they know there’s a public relations downside to doing something like that to a journalist.”
As the book’s title implies, both Ervine and Hughes died (in 2007 and 2008, respectively). In a dramatic break with the unwritten laws of paramilitary omerta, the two men agreed to go on the record on the basis that their interviews wouldn’t be published until after their deaths.
While Ervine’s account of his involvement with Loyalist paramilitaries and subsequent move into peacemaking makes for compelling reading, it’s Hughes’s controversial allegations about Gerry Adams that have dominated the headlines. A leading IRA commander in Belfast and one of the first hunger strikers, he was a friend, close ally and fellow prisoner of Adams during the most brutal years of the Troubles.
By the time of his death two years ago, the former republican soldier was bitter and disillusioned with the direction Adams had taken Sinn Fein and the IRA. As he explained in his interview: “If Gerry had told me [in the Seventies] that tomorrow was Sunday when I knew it was Monday, I would have thought twice, that maybe it was Sunday, because he said it. Now, if he told me that today was Friday, even though it was Friday, I’d call him a fucking liar.”
According to Hughes, Adams was a high-ranking member of the IRA’s army council for years and directed many of the organisation’s terrorist activities. Gerry Adams denies this. Hughes also accuses him of personally ordering the murder and disappearance of Jean McConville. Which, of course, doesn’t make it true: Hughes had reason to want to damage Gerry Adams.
However, as Moloney points out, there’s a lot more to Hughes’s story than just his dealings with Adams.
“This notion that Brendan Hughes’s interviews were all about Gerry Adams doesn’t stand up to scrutiny,” he insists. “It’s certainly a major part of it, but it’s about his whole life – his motivations, his family life, his life in the IRA, his time in jail. And it’s a very good story, a very moving story.
“Equally the rest of the Boston College archive seems to be, in the mind of people like the Provos, stuffed full of stories about Gerry Adams. It’s not true at all. The archive was a very serious academic exercise to try to explain what this phenomenon was all about, by talking to the people who were involved, both on the Republican side and the UVF side. So the idea that we went out to collect stories that were harmful to Gerry Adams and were intent on rattling skeletons doesn’t bear scrutiny. I know what’s in the archive, I’ve read it all. And I can tell you that it’s not that.”
Although instrumental in setting up the project, Moloney didn’t actually conduct the interviews himself. “People wouldn’t talk to me on that basis. It’s very different talking to a journalist. My presence in the whole thing was very low key. I sort of set it up, coordinated it and monitored the interviews. But they got on with. It just so happened that Brendan Hughes was the first major IRA figure interviewed in the archive to die, and that’s how this story came out.”
While he professes to have a sneaking admiration for the Sinn Fein president’s obvious talents, Moloney accepts that there’s a perception in some republican circles that he has it in for Adams personally. “I’ve heard that, yeah,” he agrees. “His attitude seems to be that anyone who asks questions about him has it in for him. My first book, Secret History of the IRA, primarily set out to try to find out how this extraordinary phenomenon of the peace process happened. A phenomenon which was once described to me by one of those well-meaning Protestant clerics who was involved in conversations with Sinn Fein at the time as being akin to turning the Titanic in a bath tub. Because that’s what it was. But how the hell had it happened?
“That’s what I set out to discover. And in the course of trying to find out, various aspects of the story came out – and many of those were parts of the story that Adams never wanted to see made public. It’s like there’s an authorised version of the peace process and there was the secret real version of the peace process, and because I was lucky to get sufficient material to be able to say there was another side to the peace process – that it was the Provos, and Adams himself, who started it; that it was conducted in great secrecy; that large layers of the leadership and certainly all the grassroots didn’t know what was going on through all those years – for that I am labelled a critic. As far as I’m concerned it was just investigative journalism.”
Voices from the Grave is currently being adapted into a feature length RTE documentary, which will be screened before the end of the year. Although Moloney has no plans to write any more books based on the remaining interviews in Boston College’s archives, he maintains that there’s many more controversial revelations to come.
“There is material gonna come up within the foreseeable future which will reveal the exact level of British penetration of the Provisional IRA from the start of the Troubles up to the time of the ceasefire – and it is staggering. I know what that story is. I can’t tell it. But it’s there.”

Voices from the Grave is published by Faber & Faber