Could Boston interview tapes spell trouble for Adams?

Could Boston interview tapes spell trouble for Adams?
by Peter Geoghegan
Sunday Business Post
14 July 2013

In October 2010, Voices From The Grave appeared on Irish television screens. The RTE documentary gave a unique glimpse into the history of the Troubles as seen through the eyes of two leading protagonists, loyalist David Ervine and his republican counterpart Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes.

But more than two and a half years after it first aired, Voices From The Grave continues to haunt Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.

Hughes, a former IRA commander in Belfast, claimed that Adams ordered the killing of mother-of-ten Jean McConville in 1972, allegedly for being a British spy.

Voices From The Grave, which was also a best-selling book, was based on interviews given by Ervine and Hughes as part of the Belfast Project, a larger oral history project involving numerous loyalist and republican prisoners and conducted by researchers under the auspices of Boston College.

Ervine and Hughes died in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

Accusations of Adams’s involvement in the killing of McConville resurfaced last week, as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) confirmed that tapes of interviews with IRA bomber Dolours Price, which were being held by Boston College, had been handed over to them.

Price died last January. Before her death, she claimed that Adams was her IRA officer commanding in the early 1970s, and was responsible for ordering McConville’s disappearance.

Adams has always denied that he was a member of the IRA or that he played any role in the death of McConville, whose body was found in a beach in Co Louth in 2003.

“I have consistently rejected claims that I had any knowledge of, or any part in, the abduction or killing of Jean McConville,” Adams said in the Dáil last week.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny called on Adams to make a statement about McConville’s disappearance. Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin told the Dáil: “Nobody except Deputy Adams believes he wasn’t in the IRA.”

Ed Moloney, erstwhile director of the Boston College project, said that there had been a “very political element” to the PSNI’s determination to get hold of the interviews with Dolours Price and others, conducted as part of the project.

“The PSNI knew that, at the end of the road, they would end with Adams,” Moloney told The Sunday Business Post. “There is an element there of going down this road knowing it will cause [Gerry Adams] an awful lot of trouble.”

Moloney, who was the Irish Times northern editor during the Troubles and is now based in New York, fears that the US court decision to have the tapes released could lead to issues for Adams and other senior political figures that could undermine the political situation in the North and also inhibit attempts to learn more about exactly what happened during the Troubles.

“The only way we are going to get a truth recovery process is if there is a guarantee that there won’t be prosecutions. Prosecutions just keep the war going,” he said.

The issue of the past has been centre stage in the North in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the Policing Board said that it had no confidence in the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), which was set up to re-examine deaths during the Troubles.

The Policing Board said that the HET was investigating deaths involving soldiers with less rigour than cases with no state involvement. Moloney agreed, saying it was “a way of dealing with the past that says that there was only one guilty party – the paramilitaries, not the state. The state is left out of it completely.

“Fear of prosecution will prohibit people entirely from saying what they know and it will keep the war going in another guise, and that is what has been happening in recent years,” he said.

Moloney’s viewpoint has support on the other side of the Atlantic. Last week, the chairman of the US Senate foreign relations committee, Robert Menendez, raised concerns about the impact of handing over the Price tapes to the PSNI.

In a letter to US secretary of state John Kerry, Menendez said that the release of material could “still have the effect of threatening the precious peace won by the Good Friday Agreement”.

In his letter, Menendez appealed for State Department experts on the North to examine whether the details contained in the interviews could “run counter to our national interests”.

Dealing with the past is expected to be top of the in-tray for Richard Haass, the US’s new peace envoy to the North. Haas, who was George W Bush’s envoy to Northern Ireland from 2001 to 2003, will head talks aimed at resolving troubling issues, including flags and parading. He is expected to report his findings by the end of the year.

In the North, opinions are divided on whether the release of the Boston College tapes to the PSNI will have any significant impact on the political situation on the ground.

Mick Fealty, editor of the influential blog site Slugger O’Toole, said that it would be difficult to prevent the PSNI or the HET going after other interviews in the Boston College archive, but that criminal prosecutions as a result of evidence from the tapes were “highly unlikely”.

“I don’t see material evidence coming out of this,” Fealty said. “[Dolours Price] can’t be interrogated; she can’t be brought before a jury.”

Fealty said the Boston College tapes could prove less damaging to Adams than other issues. “Adams has far more challenging stuff coming down the tracks. His brother’s trial [for child sex abuse] is coming up later this year. There is the stuff about mishandling of sex abuse within Sinn Féin.”

Irish News columnist Newton Emerson also believes there is little prospect of a criminal conviction arising from the Boston College interview with Price. “There is absolutely no conceivable possibility of this stuff being used in court,” he said. “The witness can’t be cross-examined. I’d be very surprised if you can even get this heard in court.”

The big concern for Adams would be a civil case being taken against him, said Emerson. “If you were a particularly determined grieving relative, you could decide to make the last ten years of Gerry Adams’s life miserable, even if the civil case had little chance of success.”

“Ultimately, the big issue is the assumption of a de facto amnesty that can never actually be delivered. The dam will break with a civil case,” he said, adding that there were tens of thousands of people in the North who could be motivated to bring a civil case against the republican leader.

Emerson draws parallels with other world leaders who were initially celebrated by sections of the international community, but who spent the final decades of their lives battling civil actions from relatives of victims killed by his regime. “It still all ended up in the courts. It’s very hard not to imagine that happening here,” he said.

A Sinn Féin spokesperson refused to discuss the prospects of civil cases arising from the Boston College tapes.

Emerson is sceptical about claims that the tapes could destabilise the political situation in the North. “Why would misfortune for Adams be a threat to the peace process? It’s very hard to believe the Provos kicking off again because Gerry has a hearing,” he said.

“I just can’t see any actual revelation from the Troubles bringing people out on to the streets in armed fury. It’s just too far away. Half the people in Northern Ireland have no living memory of the Troubles. When you talk about something that happened 40 years ago to a 20-year-old, it’s like talking about something that happened in the 1930s.”

………………………

Belfast Project timeline

Funded by Boston College, the Belfast Project was coordinated by Ed Moloney, the Irish journalist now based in New York.

Anthony McIntyre, a former republican prisoner with a PhD in history, and former loyalist prisoner Wilson McArthur conducted interviews with leading figures in the IRA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association.

Crucially, all interviewees were promised that their recordings would not be released until after their deaths; – now these testimonies could provide evidence for criminal proceedings.

The Belfast Project began in 2001 and ended in 2006, but it remained a secret until 2010, when Moloney, with Boston College’s imprimatur, published Voices from the Grave, a book based on interviews given by former IRA officer commanding and hunger striker Brendan Hughes and former Progressive Unionist Party leader David Ervine.

In May 2011, British authorities issued Boston College with a subpoena, demanding tapes of interviews with both Hughes and Dolours Price, after the latter gave an interview to a Northern Irish newspaper intimating her role in Jean McConville’s disappearance. In August, a second subpoena followed, this time calling for all interviews that contained any information relating to the McConville case.

In December 2011, a Boston federal court judge upheld the first subpoena. Boston College criticised the verdict but surprisingly declined to appeal. Instead the case was taken to the US appeal courts by Moloney and McIntyre.

The researchers also called for Boston College to destroy all tapes of the interviews.

“The archive must now be closed down and the interviews be either returned or shredded since Boston College is no longer a safe nor fit and proper place for them to be kept,” they said in a statement.

Price died in January this year. On April 15, the Supreme Court reduced the amount of material to be handed over from 85 interviews (roughly half of the archive) to segments of 11 interviews.

Last month, the PSNI travelled to Boston to collect tapes and transcripts of interviews given by Dolours Price. However, Jack Dunn, director of public affairs at Boston College, denied claims that the university had handed over the tapes.

“The Dolours Price tapes have not been handed over to the PSNI by Boston College,” Dunn told the website Irish Central.

“If they have been given to the PSNI, they have been supplied by the Department of Justice. It has been inaccurately reported that PSNI detectives came to Boston over the weekend and took tapes from us. That is completely untrue.”

Moloney told The Sunday Business Post that Boston College had “abandoned” Belfast Project interviewees.

“This is a disgraceful episode in American academic history,” he said. “My advice to anyone interested in setting up a controversial research project is to avoid American universities because they will sell you down the river as soon as look at you.”

SF leader’s version of past is insulting nonsense

SF leader’s version of past is insulting nonsense
Irish Independent
08 JULY 2013

ONCE again the spotlight is on Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. After a lengthy US legal battle, the Police Service of Northern Ireland now has tapes and transcripts of interviews with the late, unrepentant IRA member, Dolours Price.

These conversations focus on a period in the early 1970s when people were abducted, murdered and secretly buried because they were believed to be informing on the IRA. Victims included widowed mother-of-10 Jean McConville, and they became collectively known as “The Disappeared”.

Ms Price was a convicted IRA car bomber. Mr Adams has always denied her allegations that he was her IRA commanding officer, and he has also denied ordering Mrs McConville’s abduction and murder in 1972. More astonishingly, he continues to insist that he was never a member of the IRA. Most people believe that not only was Mr Adams a member, he was in fact one of the dominant forces in that organisation for a very long period.

Mr Adams’s version of his past is insulting nonsense. He tells us about the need to get to the truth of many of the things that happened in those decades of horror in the North, but refuses to give us an honest account of his own role.

Once again, the spotlight is back on Gerry Adams as PSNI detectives begin investigating the contents of the tapes. Once again, we will hope for more than just glib and dismissive denials that mix weariness and cynicism.

To paraphrase his own celebrated soundbite, these allegations haven’t gone away. And they will not go away until the Sinn Fein president gives us some real answers.

PSNI receive Dolours Price interviews

PSNI receive Dolours Price interviews
Irish Republican News
7 July 2013

Confidential interviews with senior IRA figure Dolours Price have been handed over to British security forces, it has been confirmed.

The PSNI police in the north of Ireland said two detectives had e travelled to Boston to take possession of materials authorised by the United States Supreme Court.

“The officers will return to Northern Ireland to assess the material and continue with their inquiries,” a spokesman added.

It is thought the interviews may contain information which might be used by the PSNI against a number of republicans, including senior Sinn Fein figures.

Dolours was a former republican hunger-striker who became a bitter critic of Sinn Fein when the party encouraged the IRA to give up its weapons and joined a local devolved administration under British rule.

She clashed with party leader Gerry Adams in recent years over his denials that he had never been a member of the IRA.

The 62-year-old consistently had claimed that Mr Adams, now a Louth TD, had played a significant role in IRA actions, including the controversial killing of alleged informer Jean McConville.

She who died in January amid a trans-Atlantic legal battle over her interviews and after a long battle with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

The allegations are among those believed to be contained in an interview with Irish ‘researchers’ Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney, who were hired for the purpose by the American university.

The recordings were started in 2001 and were made on the condition that confidentiality would be guaranteed until after the death of the republicans and loyalists who took part.

McIntyre and Moloney failed to block the release of the tapes after the PSNI launched a high profile legal challenge to obtain the testimony. However, they said the eleven interviews which were ordered to be released to the PSNI are of limited value, and significantly reduced from a previous demand for 85 interviews.

The PSNI’s move to take possession of the tapes this weekend appeared designed to pre-empt a new legal challenge based on an internal British police report which found bias in the handling of historical cases by the PSNI’s Historical Enquiries Team (HET).

The Policing Board in the North has said it has no confidence in the leadership of the HET Team on foot of the damning report, which found British soldiers had received preferential treatment from investigators.

In a statement on Saturday, Moloney and McIntyre urged the Dublin and London governments “to suspend all criminal and non-criminal inquiries into the past until agreement has been reached by all parties on a credible way forward and a mechanism to deal with the past has been created in such a way that it commands widespread confidence and support”.

PSNI confirm securing Boston College tapes on Jean McConville’s murder

PSNI confirm securing Boston College tapes on Jean McConville’s murder
by Gemma Murray
News Letter
Published on the 07 July 2013

THE PSNI have confirmed that transcripts of interviews relating to the murder of IRA victim Jean McConville, carried out as part of a project at Boston College, are being handed over.

The PSNI had been attempting to obtain the transcripts of tapes recorded with IRA member Dolours Price, who died in January.

The transcripts are understood to contain information about the death and disappearance of the Belfast mother-of-10.

In a statement the PSNI said: “Two detectives from Serious Crime Branch have travelled to Boston to take possession of materials authorised by the United States appeal court as part of their investigation into the murder of Jean McConville.

The west Belfast mother was among dozens of people – later known as the Disappeared – who were abducted, murdered and secretly buried by republican militants during the Troubles.

The officers will return to Northern Ireland to assess the material and continue with their inquiries.”

The transcripts were made as part of Boston College’s ‘Belfast Project’, which was designed to be an oral history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

Project director, Ed Moloney, and his researcher, Anthony McIntyre, had resisted attempts by the PSNI to obtain the transcripts, and had hoped that the US Supreme Court would overturn a Boston Federal Court decision to hand the tapes over.

Ms Price was an unrepentant republican hard-liner who became a bitter critic of Sinn Fein when the party endorsed the Good Friday Agreement and encouraged the IRA to give up its weapons.

She clashed with party leader Gerry Adams in recent years over her allegations that he had been her IRA Officer Commanding during the early 1970s.

The 62-year-old consistently claimed that Mr Adams, now a Louth TD, had ordered the kidnap and killing of Mrs McConville in 1972.

Mr Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA.

She said she had made the claims in an interview with the American university academics who have compiled an oral history on Northern Ireland’s 40-year conflict.

The recordings were started in 2001 and were made on the condition that confidentiality would be guaranteed until after the death of the republican and loyalist paramilitaries who took part.

Price, the former wife of actor Stephen Rea, was convicted and jailed along with her sister Marian for the 1973 attack on London’s Old Bailey courts in which one man died and more than 200 people were injured.

She spent eight years in jail including several weeks on hunger strike before being released in 1980.

Revealed: Secret murder tapes that ‘name’ Gerry Adams over IRA execution of mother accused of passing information to British

Revealed: Secret murder tapes that ‘name’ Gerry Adams over IRA execution of mother accused of passing information to British

• Adams is accused of ordering execution of mother-of-ten Jean McConville
• IRA woman who drove Mrs McConville to her death recorded a confession
• The tape had languished for ten years in a Boston College library
• It has now been handed over to the Police Service of Northern Ireland

By BOB GRAHAM
Daily Mail
PUBLISHED: 21:10 GMT, 6 July 2013

The night of December 7, 1972, is forever branded on Michael McConville’s memory.

That night a gang of masked IRA terrorists smashed down the door of his family’s West Belfast home and dragged out his mother Jean, as several of her ten children clutched at her skirts and screamed.

It was the last time Michael, then 11, was to see his mother alive.

Horror: The remains of IRA murder victim Jean McConville are recovered from an area near the Templetown beach in County Louth in 2003

Now, at last, the McConville children are on the verge of hearing – from beyond the grave – the confession of the IRA woman who drove their mother to her death.

Yesterday, 11 clandestine tapes recorded by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, which have languished for ten years in the archives of the Burns Library in Boston College in the US, were handed over to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

They include an admission from Dolores Price, one of the IRA’s most infamous terrorists, that she ferried Michael’s 37-year-old mother to the Irish Republic where she was tortured, tied up and shot in the head.

And she asserts it was Gerry Adams who sanctioned the murder.

Adams, who now sits in the Republic of Ireland’s parliament, has always strenuously denied belonging to the IRA and any involvement in terrorist murders.

But Michael McConville, now 51, believes the tapes’ shocking contents could lead to fresh arrests – among them that of Adams.

Price’s damning revelation is corroborated in another tape, made by Brendan ‘Darkie’ Hughes, the terror-hardened deputy commander of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade.

He, too, insists it was Adams who signed the Catholic Belfast housewife’s death warrant. Yet Adams claims credit for shaping the 1996 peace agreement that ended Ulster’s Troubles after he swapped the ArmaLite for the ballot box.

Price and Hughes, now both dead, agreed to make the tapes with Irish academics on the strict proviso they remain locked away while they lived. Price’s death in January this year freed the Boston College from its obligation to keep them secret.

The release of the tapes has been at the centre of a bitter legal wrangle. Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly and a self-confessed former IRA commander, and US Secretary of State John Kerry have waged a high-profile battle to have them suppressed on the grounds that they could derail Ulster’s fragile peace process.

For Michael and his siblings, their hope is that the recordings may at last lead to their mother’s executioners being brought to justice.

‘If Price mentions Gerry Adams in the tapes, that he was in some way involved and if it can be proved, he should be tried,’ Michael says. ‘At the very least I’d like to see him stand in court and answer the accusations.

‘You can’t turn around and say it is right to kill someone the way they did, especially a mother, no matter what your beliefs are.’

Michael’s mother, Jean, a Protestant who converted to Catholicism when she married husband Archie, had moved to the staunchly Republican Divis Flats in the Lower Falls area after being intimidated out of a Loyalist area.

When the IRA eventually confessed to abducting and killing her, they claimed it was because she was a ‘tout’ who was passing information to the British Army.

The McConville family has always insisted that their mother’s only involvement with the Army was that she once gave succour to an injured squaddie.

Michael has yet to hear the tapes. But shortly before she died Delores Price chillingly told me of her role in the murder of his mother – one of 17 IRA victims known as the Disappeared. She told me that her memoir, including her role driving away the Disappeared, was recorded in the Boston Project – as the collection of tapes are known.

Price, who led the IRA terror squad that bombed the Old Bailey in 1973, admitted she drove Mrs McConville to Dundalk in the Irish Republic.

She confessed she was a member of a select unit of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, codenamed the Unknowns, whose mission was to take those believed to have betrayed Republicans for interrogation.

For those found guilty by the Republican kangaroo courts, the only sentence was death. ‘I never knew for sure their ultimate end, I was simply told by Gerry Adams to take the people away,’

Price admitted. ‘Some, I knew their fate, some I didn’t. I took seven in all. My job was to hand them over to others. I don’t even remember some of their names.

‘I drove Jean McConville away. She was a very, very unpleasant woman. I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and I don’t think she deserved to die. I didn’t know she was a mother.

‘I had a call one night and Adams was in a house down the Falls Road. McConville had been snatched and held for several days.

‘It was part of my job to take them across the border to hand them over. She got into my car and as far as she was concerned she was being taken to a place of safety by the Legion of Mary [a Catholic charity].

‘She went on and on about “them f****** Provies, they wouldn’t have the balls to shoot me. F*** them”. I was saying to myself “please don’t say any more”. But she went on and on, she convicted herself out of her own mouth.

‘It wasn’t my decision to “disappear” her, thank God. All I had to do was drive her. I even got her fish and chips and cigarettes before I left her.’

Price refused to enlarge on why Adams ordered Mrs McConville’s execution, but commented: ‘You don’t deserve to die if you are an unpleasant person, as she was, but you do deserve to die if you are an informer. Particularly in a war. That is the Republican way.’

For the McConville children, their mother’s death blighted their lives for ever. Today a fragmented family, they rarely meet or discuss the trauma of her being taken.

Michael remembers his older brother Archie, then 16, followed the terrorists dragging his mother onto the street, begging: ‘Can I go with my Mammy?’ One of the gunmen took him aside, put his pistol to the teenager’s temple and told him to ‘f*** off’.

He added: ‘Not long after she was taken, a local IRA man knocked on the door and handed Mum’s purse and wedding ring to my sister.

I knew then she hadn’t just been murdered but executed. We found out she had been taken to a beach, had her hands tied, was knocked to the ground beside what would be her own grave and shot in the head.’

The Provisional IRA immediately imposed a menacing omerta among the West Belfast community. To talk of Jean McConville’s fate was to invite a visit from a death squad.’

When, 30 years after her abduction, the IRA admitted they had killed Mrs McConville, exhaustive searches found no body. Then, in August 2003, walkers stumbled upon her remains buried on Shelling Hill beach, Dundalk.

Now, for Michael McConville and his family, justice is at last in sight.

PSNI confirms fresh move to obtain Boston College transcripts

PSNI confirms fresh move to obtain Boston College transcripts
Police confident interview notes can now be handed over to murder investigation
Dan Keenan
Irish Times
Thu, May 16, 2013

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has confirmed it is seeking details of the testimony given to an oral history project at Boston College by the late Dolours Price.

The republican, who died in January, was one of those who gave evidence to the project on condition it would not be released until after her death.

The PSNI had sought disclosure of the transcripts of her interview as part of its investigation into the disappearance and murder of Jane McConville, a mother of 10, in 1972.

The Belfast Project was designed to provide researchers and academics with insights into the Troubles.

The disclosure issue went as far as the US supreme court which decided last month not to hear an appeal against making the transcripts available to the PSNI, thus removing a significant legal impediment.

The PSNI told The Irish Times: “We are making plans to take possession of the material and proceed with our inquiries.”

It is understood that while the process will take some time, the PSNI is confident it will obtain the transcripts.

‘Secret’ records of IRA bomber Dolours Price to be released

‘Secret’ records of IRA bomber Dolours Price to be released
Dolours Price claimed that the Sinn Féin politician Gerry Adams was in charge of an IRA unit
Alexandra Frean in Washington
The Times (London)
April 16 2013

The US Supreme Court has cleared the way for police in Northern Ireland to be given taped interviews carried out with Dolours Price, a convicted IRA bomber.

Price, who died in January, was interviewed by academics as part of the Belfast Project at Boston College in Massachusetts, which was designed to create an oral history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has been attempting to secure the taped interviews as part of its investigation into the kidnapping and killing by the IRA of Jean McConville in 1972, a mother of ten whom the terrorists believed was a British Army informer.

Price, a former hunger striker and wife of the actor Stephen Rea, was one of 28 former loyalist and republican paramilitaries who gave taped interviews to the Belfast Project, on the understanding that the tapes would not be released until after their death.

She was convicted for her part in a car bombing of the Old Bailey in 1973, which injured 200. In a newspaper interview in 2010 — given long after she spoke to researchers for the Belfast Project — she claimed that the Sinn Féin politician Gerry Adams was in charge of an IRA unit and gave the order for the Old Bailey bombing. Mr Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA.

Last October, before Price died, the journalist Ed Moloney and former IRA member Anthony McIntyre, two of the leading figures behind the Belfast Project, attempted to block the handover of the tapes to the police in Northern Ireland. Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling means that the tapes, which are being held by the Department of Justice, can now be released.

Jack Dunn, a spokesman for Boston College, which was not a party to yesterday’s Supreme Court case, said that the college was in the process of challenging another subpoena to hand over to Northern Irish police seven different interview tapes also deemed to be relevant to the McConville murder. That case is to be heard before the US First Circuit Court of Appeal.

At issue in both cases are the limits of confidentiality agreements when pitted against an active criminal investigation, the college said.

Mr Dunn added: “We have asked the courts to balance our interest in protecting oral history and academic research against the interests of the US Government in upholding a treaty obligation to provide legal assistance to Great Britain.”

In prison, Price staged a 203-day hunger strike when she was force-fed every day. She was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in 1981 after serving seven years of a life sentence, suffering tuberculosis.

In media interviews, Price said she went through years of depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

PSNI to access Boston College IRA tapes

PSNI to access Boston College IRA tapes
UTV News
Monday, 15 April 2013

Interviews with former paramilitaries which could hold information about the Disappeared will be made available to police.

On Monday, a US Supreme Court judge upheld the ruling that the recordings, carried out under the supervision of Boston College researchers Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre, should be handed over to the authorities.

The discussions, which began in 2001, with republican and loyalist paramilitaries formed part of an oral history of the Troubles.

Ex-IRA member Dolours Price was one of the interviewees, and it is claimed the former prisoner discussed the disappearance of Jean McConville.

The mother of ten was abducted and murdered by the IRA in the 1972. Her body was recovered more than 30 years later.

The interviews were conducted under the assurance that the tapes would not be made public while the subjects were still alive. Price was found dead at her home in Dublin in January this year.

Former IRA member Brendan Hughes, who also took part in the project, died in 2008.

Authorities investigating Mrs McConville’s disappearance had called for the US government to subpoena the documents, invoking a treaty between the UK and USA.

But Moloney and McIntyre – himself a former IRA volunteer-turned-writer – had argued that the tapes should be withheld under the First Amendment.

On Monday, an American court refused to hear an appeal lodged by Moloney and McIntyre. A further court ruling on the release of material involving different interviewees is due.

Price interviews may be released after US ruling

Price interviews may be released after US ruling
Interviews with the late Dolours Price could be released to British authorities
RTE News
Monday, 15 Apr 2013 16:04

Controversial interviews with the late Dolours Price, who was jailed for her part in the IRA bombing of the Old Bailey in March 1973, could be released to British authorities following a ruling by the US Supreme Court.

The interviews are contained in an oral history project at Boston College in the US.

British authorities sought to have the tapes and transcripts handed over.

It is widely thought their request forms part of the investigation into the disappearance and murder of Belfast mother Jean McConville during the Troubles.

Today the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from two of the men behind the Belfast Project at Boston College – Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre.

They had sought to intervene to block the release of interviews with the late Ms Price to police in Northern Ireland.

The US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston had ruled that two of the interviews, with Brendan Hughes and Ms Price, could be handed over.

The Supreme Court had temporarily stayed that ruling while Mr Moloney and Mr McIntyre filed their appeal.

But now that their appeal has been refused, it is likely the request can be enforced and the transcripts handed over.

Boston College project: PSNI get Dolours Price interviews access

Boston College project: PSNI get Dolours Price interviews access
The interviews were carried out as part of a project at Boston College
BBC News
15 April 2013

Transcripts of interviews carried out with an IRA woman can now be handed over to the police in Northern Ireland.

The PSNI had been attempting to obtain the transcripts of tapes recorded with Dolours Price, who died in January.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal against handing over the transcripts.

They were made as part of Boston College’s ‘Belfast Project’, which was designed to be an oral history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

The project was supposed to provide a reference for students and academics studying the conflict.

It was done on the proviso that no interview would be released until after the contributor had died.

Interviews with one loyalist, and one republican contributor formed the backbone of a book and television documentary following their deaths.

David Ervine and Brendan Hughes spoke candidly about their time in the UVF and IRA, and Hughes made a number of allegations about the role of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams.

Hughes claimed that Adams had been in charge of the IRA unit responsible for the kidnap, torture and murder of a group of people that became known as ‘the Disappeared’.

Mr Adams has always strenuously denied the claims.

Following a newspaper report on Dolours Price, in which she allegedly claimed to have been involved in the disappearances, the PSNI began proceedings in the US courts to obtain her interviews, and any others relating to the disappeared.

The project director, Ed Moloney, and his researcher, Anthony McIntyre, resisted the attempts, and had hoped that the Supreme Court would overturn a Boston Federal Court decision to hand the tapes over.

Mr Moloney has said that Ms Price, who was part of the cell that bombed the Old bailey in 1973, did not make claims about the Disappeared in the interviews in any case.

Despite the Supreme Court’s decision, tapes recorded with other paramilitaries deemed to contain information about the disappeared will not be handed over yet.

They are subject to another appeal by Boston College, which is yet to be heard.