In 2010 he revealed the archive’s existence when he published Voices From the Grave, a book based on McIntyre’s interviews with Brendan Hughes, a disaffected former colleague of Gerry Adams, and David Ervine, a former loyalist paramilitary, after their deaths. Hughes identified Adams as an IRA commander and implicated him in the death of Jean McConville, a Roman Catholic mother of ten whom the IRA had abducted and executed in 1972 for allegedly informing.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) took note. At its behest the US justice department issued Boston College with a subpoena for the Hughes tapes. Despite Moloney’s vigorous protests it complied.
The justice department then issued a second subpoena demanding tapes of all interviews mentioning McConville. Moloney and McIntyre went to court and lost. The US Supreme Court refused to hear the case. This time the surrendered tapes included an interview Moloney had conducted with Dolours Price, the convicted Old Bailey bomber who was another disaffected former Adams acolyte. In it she described her central role in McConville’s abduction and claimed Adams had ordered it.
In 2014 the PSNI arrested Adams, questioned him for four days about McConville’s murder then released him without charge. The following year the Public Prosecution Service confirmed that he would not be charged, calling the available evidence “insufficient to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction”. The Belfast Project was formally terminated amid widespread criticism.
It was an infelicitous end to a career distinguished by Moloney’s courage, independence, relentlessness and meticulous attention to detail as he reported on Northern Ireland’s darkest days. Patrick Radden Keefe, the author of Say Nothing, a bestselling account of McConville’s abduction, said Moloney’s thick eyebrows gave him the appearance of a “tenacious badger”.
Edmund Moloney was born in England in 1948. As a child he suffered polio, which left him with a lifelong limp and sympathy for the underdog. His father, though Irish, was a British Army doctor so he was educated in Germany, Gibraltar and Malaysia before enrolling at Queen’s University in Belfast in the late 1960s.
There he witnessed the start of the Troubles, took part in civil rights demonstrations and was briefly a member of the Official IRA when it was engaged in political rather than armed struggle.
After graduating he spent two years teaching English in Libya and then taught sociology at Belfast Metropolitan College. He and other young left-wingers launched an occasional publication called Belfast Bulletin — his first venture into journalism.
By 1981 he was northern editor of The Irish Times. There he exposed the Kincora boys’ home scandal, and his excellent republican contacts gave him the inside track on the hunger strikes in which ten republicans starved themselves to death in the Maze prison.
In 1986 he co-authored with Andy Pollak his first book, a critical and unauthorised biography of the hardline Unionist leader Ian Paisley. In 1987 he became northern editor of Dublin’s Sunday Tribune.
Two years after that he published an interview with Billy Stobie, a senior loyalist paramilitary who alleged a police cover-up in the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane, a lawyer with many republican clients. The Stevens inquiry into police collusion demanded his notes of the interview. Moloney refused to hand them over, despite facing possible imprisonment. He argued in the High Court that to do so would breach journalistic ethics and undermine journalism in Northern Ireland. Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Carswell agreed with him in a landmark victory for press freedom. A week later Moloney was voted Irish journalist of the year.
At the start of the Troubles Moloney was close to Adams: Keefe’s book tells how, when Adams was on the run, Moloney spent the night on the floor of his hotel room because it was unsafe to leave. But their friendship cooled as Moloney published stories critical of Sinn Fein and the IRA. Martin McGuinness dubbed him “Ed Baloney”.
In 2002 he published A Secret History of the IRA, a bestseller that laid bare the inner workings of the paramilitary organisation, and how Adams was deceiving the IRA rank-and-file members as he joined the peace process. Adams called the book “a mixture of innuendo, recycled claims, nodding and winking”.
In 2020 Village magazine revealed how, years earlier, Moloney had written an article for The Irish Times exposing the criminal activities of the Official IRA. The article was not published, but someone passed it to the Official IRA, which passed word to the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) paramilitary organisation that Moloney was a member of the Irish National Liberation Army.
Moloney was summoned by the UDA, but fortunately for him its leaders concluded the allegation was false.
In 2000 he had moved to New York with his American wife, Joan McKiernan, whom he had met during his early days in Belfast, and son, Ciarán. He did so partly for his own safety but also to be near his wife’s family.
His prodigious output continued. He wrote for an array of newspapers and magazines, and published an updated version of his IRA history in 2007 and Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat? the following year.
In 2010 he produced an award-winning documentary based on Voices From the Grave, and in 2018 I, Dolours, another documentary based on the interview that Price had given him before her death in which she talked in harrowing detail about her activities in the IRA in the 1970s. Those documentaries were arguably the silver linings of his ill-fated Belfast Project.
