Thanks to the level of disinformation, confusion and outright lying, I think the time is overdue to address the issue of Paul Bew’s involvement in the Boston College Belfast Project. These events happened fourteen years or more ago and within that memory constraint and limitation this is how I remember it.

I am the person who had the idea for the Belfast Project and it was conceived long before Boston College or Paul Bew came on the scene. Bew was its Boston midwife in a sense but he was not there on the night of impregnation.

By the time of the Good Friday Agreement, I had already started work on ‘A Secret History of the IRA’ and research for this book along with my reporting for the Sunday Tribune had convinced me that the Troubles were ending, the IRA’s war was over. I was also convinced from what I knew that this ending would be more comprehensive and final than any other in the IRA’s history, that the IRA would eventually agree to destroy its weapons and the leadership would go on a journey lit up by the ideological bridges burned behind them.

With the Troubles ending it was clear that unless an effort was made, the life stories of those who had been active in the IRA and other republican groups would be lost. That was point number one. There was a simple need to collect activists’ stories before they were gone. And I didn’t see much chance of anyone else taking on this task.

Point number two was that if the IRA’s war was typical of most, the writing of its history would be left to those, mostly leaders, who had every reason to ensure their version of the truth dominated, even if that truth was contaminated by falsehoods and invention. There was a need to ensure that a more complete and credible story of the IRA was collected and preserved.

Since Gerry Adams’s arrest by the PSNI there has been an outburst of criticism of the Belfast Project on the grounds that the project did not include interviews with the pro-Adams’ camp. This was the definition of bias in the eyes of critics.

First of all those who make this criticism do so in complete ignorance of who was and was not interviewed, nor do they know what was said in these interviews.

Second, if by this criticism people mean we should have included interviewees whose stories would begin from the base that Gerry Adams was never in the IRA and Martin McGuinness left the IRA in 1974, then I am proud to say that we did exclude such people. To have included such an absurd, fallacious and egregiously dishonest version of history would have rendered the archive a farce. Interviews which proceeded from such a claim would be utterly useless to any serious scholar. And if by proclaiming this I earn the title ‘Sinn Fein critic’, then I proudly wear it.

The sad truth is that as long as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness persist in their fictional life histories it will not be possible to collect anything remotely resembling a credible oral history, or any other history of the IRA, if those collecting the history rely on sources who repeat such nonsense.

These were two men, the former in particular, who were instrumental and often crucial in determining almost every twist and turn that the IRA took over the past four decades and to build the foundations of an oral history archive on the nonsense that they were never there, and could not have done all these things, is to transform the telling of history into vaudeville. The truth cannot ever come by that route.

To have taken such an approach to the story of the IRA would be rather like constructing an oral history archive based on the events of Bloody Sunday and interviewing only soldiers who never fired a shot on the day, thereby validating the notion that the British Army was entirely innocent of murder. Who could possibly stand over such a project? Yet we are criticised for not doing the same with the IRA!

But back to the story.

I was aware of the work done by the Bureau of Military History (BMI) in Dublin and began thinking about the possibility of repeating that work north of the Border. I had known Anthony McIntyre for several years by that point, knew he was writing his PhD thesis on the IRA in the 1970’s and was well aware that his analysis of the Provsionals’ political development was both sceptical and critical.

And as far as I was concerned that was a good reason to approach and ask him if he would be interested in developing the idea of a BMI initiative north of the Border.

Let me explain why. I saw in Mackers a lot of myself, a searcher for truth even at the cost of being derided as biased or partisan. I knew him to be the consummate scholar; for sure he had his own views about the Provos and some of these were scathing but I also knew from the work of his that I had read that when it came to research he suppressed his views in the quest for truth. He did not shape the facts to suit his views.

The same attitude, I like to think, had informed nearly all of my journalism and while it had done my career trajectory nothing but harm, I had managed to get the story right or more right than a lot of my rivals most of the time.

An oral history project on the IRA in circumstances where the well had already been poisoned by Sinn Fein’s dissembling needed the involvement of someone with those qualities if it was going to be meaningful and credible.

Let me give you an example of what I mean from the place where I now live, the United States. A few months ago the Obama White House rolled out its new Affordable Care Act websites and it was a disaster. Most of them either didn’t work or were maddeningly slow; it was clear that someone in the Obama machine had screwed up.

The bulk of journalists did what they always do, trot off to the White House to ask Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney what had happened and then dutifully report it alongside criticism leveled by Obama’s congressional opponents. That was the safe thing to do and doubtless most of their news editors were happy with their coverage because no-one had been scooped or shown up by a rival. Only a few – some would call them troublemakers, I would call them proper journalists – went off in search of that internet expert in the Department of Health whose warnings about impending disaster had been laughed off or ignored.

In terms of covering the IRA story during the peace process I like to think I was the one who went off in search of that expert rather than Jay Carney; and I saw in Mackers someone who would take the same approach to the task of collecting historical interviews for this project (although in practice it was often a case of accepting whoever was willing to be interviewed!).

So, I make no apologies for hiring him. I hired him precisely because he is stubborn, iconoclastic, seditious, discerning, critical and incisive. And I hired him because I also knew he would be an objective scholar. I am proud of his work and so, until recently, was Boston College. And his work got the ultimate endorsement from an American judge: “A bona fide academic exercise of considerable intellectual merit”.

Again, back to the story.

I then spent a few months exploring the feasibility of the idea in Ireland and quickly discovered or realised that there were two insuperable obstacles. The first was that most libraries or colleges would run away screaming, their hair on fire at the very mention of an archive on the IRA. You might as well have suggested creating one on child rapists.

The truth is that back in those days the IRA was truly toxic for Irish academe, something they should remember now when some of their leading lights direct criticism at us. They would never have taken on such a project; cowardice runs very deep in that community. Where are their oral histories of the IRA? Why were we the only people with this idea?

The second is that no former or existing IRA member with half a brain would agree to get involved if the archive was housed at an Irish or British library or college. That was simply because of a lack of trust, created in part because there had been instances of such places alerting the police to sensitive material on their shelves. More cowardice on the part of academe.

The idea was dead, and I let it go.

And then Paul Bew showed up. He was spending a year as a visiting scholar at Boston College, a year after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, from September 1999 to September 2000. While at the college he had been approached by the librarian Bob O’Neill who admitted that he was beginning to realise that he didn’t have much of a collection of anything to do with the Troubles or the North. He was anxious to correct that. The Linenhall library had a collection of political ephemera for instance; would it be possible to replicate that? And he asked Bew if he would ask around and if there was anyone with a viable idea then they should approach Boston College. Funding might be available for the right idea.

And that simply, is how it started. Paul approached me, I explained the idea, contact was made with O’Neill and the rest is history. Apart from endorsing his PhD student, Anthony McIntyre as the lead researcher, and later suggesting names of former students for the UVF part, that was the sum of Paul Bew’s involvement in the genesis of the Belfast Project.

Boston College’s involvement allowed me to think bigger. I proposed that we expand to include the UVF which we did. And there were plans, funds permitting, to include an archive on the RUC and even British Army. Much later on we suggested that a victims’ archive be created as well.

As for the Tom Hachey preface to Voices From The Grave, my memory of the reference to Paul Bew reading interviews is of thinking that Hachey meant to say that he was involved in the same limited mission as Kevin O’Neill, i.e. reading one or two very early interviews to judge Mackers’ interviewing technique (whereas in fact Hachey’s affidavit to the first court hearing in Boston makes it clear that Bew was not involved in this at all).

Since Paul Larkin’s fantasy went into circulation I have talked to both Kevin O’Neill and Paul Bew about this early sampling exercise. Kevin believes Paul was never involved in that exercise while Paul outright denies it and Hachey told the court in Boston the same. I am inclined to believe them and even if they are mistaken we are talking about two interviews out of over 200.

The truth, disappointing though it may be to the conspiracists, is that Paul Bew’s involvement in the Belfast Project while helpful and important at the start, was in reality minimal and limited. Paul Bew has his own political views for sure but he is a respected political scientist and historian well capable of building a firewall around his involvement in this project, limited as it was. And such is the respect in which he is held in academic circles that his advice and input would always be welcome.

This criticism of Bew from the Larkins and the Danny Morrisons is itself immensely revealing. Do they assume that someone with defined political views imposes those views on their other activities because this is how they themselves behave? Is this why Larkin no longer works at the BBC?

There is a fatal flaw in the Larkin conspiracy, aside from the fact that it is the product of a fevered and obsessive mind. Implied in his analysis is the idea that Paul Bew directly or indirectly let the police authorities know about the archive. He implies that but as far as I know hasn’t had the courage to say it publicly. But riddle me this? The Belfast Project closed down in 2006 so if Bew had told them all about it, why did the PSNI wait five years to move against the archive? Why not straight away in 2006?

That’s the problem with conspiracies. There’s always one loose thread dangling down. Pull it hard enough and the rest unravels.

Congratulations to Chris Bray who today was given a five-year, multi-million pound contract to manage troubled Tottenham Hotspurs football club in North London. He will take over a team that finished a disappointing sixth in the BPL table last season despite spending over £100 million on new talent to replace Gareth Bale who was transferred to Real Madrid for a record-breaking £86 million.

Chris Bray, new manager of Spurs

Meanwhile Argentinian blogger Mauricio Pochettino has taken over the Chris Bray blog and will relocate to Los Angeles where he will discover he has a wife and young daughter to house and feed and a promising career as an adjunct professor of history.

Mauricio Pochettini, takes over Chris Bray’s blog and will move to La-La land.

Following a credible claim from Carrie Twomey, the wife of former Boston College researcher, Anthony McIntyre that her phone and email communications with diplomatic staff of the United States government have recently been subject to electronic interception, I call upon the management of the Sunday World newspaper to give a clear and unequivocal assurance that their journalists have gathered material only by honest, straightforward and open means, and that their intrusions into Carrie Twomey’s private life have not been the result of illegal activity.

Ed Moloney, former director, Boston College Belfast Project

Some perceptive commentary on the Martin Mansergh critique of the Boston College project published in the Irish Times which I endorse thoroughly. Indeed the premise that history should also be told by the losers and the grassroots informed the creation of the project. Click to expand.

The new subpoena threatened by the PSNI against the Belfast Project at Boston College will have to be served via the 1994 Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) which gives either of the parties, the US government or the UK administration, the power to stop any threatened action because of “rights or obligations” under other international agreements.

Article 18, section 1 of the MLAT has this to say:

The Parties, or Central Authorities, shall consult promptly, at the request of either, concerning the implementation of this Treaty either generally or in relation to a particular case. Such consultation may in particular take place if, in the opinion of either Party or Central Authority, the expenses or other resources required for the implementation of this Treaty are of an extraordinary nature, or if either Party has rights or obligations under another bilateral or multilateral agreement relating to the subject matter of this Treaty.

This means that Eric Holder, the US Attorney-General has the right to ask his opposite number in Britain, Home Secretary, Theresa May to halt the subpoena on the grounds that the PSNI move would harm US interests in relation to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Holder would be entitled to say that since the Good Friday Agreement is in large measure the creation of the US government – Presidents Clinton and George W Bush played a major role in both bringing it into being and implementing it – then US foreign policy interests would be adversely affected by the plunder of the oral history archive.

For example, the PSNI action is so unprecedented and extreme that it risks undermining one of the pillars of the new political dispensation in the North, Nationalist support for policing, a development that would be of concern in Washington.

Whether Holder does this is entirely dependent on the political pressure applied on the Obama White House, especially by Irish-America. The police assault on Boston College, and through that on the Good Friday Agreement and its architects, is so unprecedented that some sort of reaction from Irish-America seems likely.

The PSNI action against the Boston archive is, for example, in stark contrast to  the force’s inactivity in relation to proven and deadly instances of collusion between named and known members of the security forces, including the old Special Branch, and Loyalist paramilitaries, collusion that was likely known about and approved by the British intelligence agency, MI5.

While the PSNI has pursued the Boston archive with vigour it has done next to nothing to bring security force members to book for involvement in murder. For example a 2007 report by police ombudman Nuala O’Loan which exposed RUC Special Branch handlers who had turned a blind eye to their agent’s involvement in a string of killings has gathered dust since. The full report can be read here.

The most generous interpretation of the latest PSNI move is “the lunatics are running  the asylum” theory, which says that either the senior management of the force does not know or care what the consequences of this action are. The other, more malign interpretation is that the leadership of the PSNI have a very clear idea of the potential damage and, under cover of pursuing historical crime, are motivated by a desire for revenge against those seen as responsible for changes in policing such as the disbandment of the Special Branch.

This is just to confirm that Carrie McIntyre was never employed in any capacity by the Belfast Project, either paid or unpaid, and had no role to play in the collection, storage, transcription or transport of any interviews.

This and other wild stories are being invented for malicious reasons and being given credence by publications for whom the idea of checking facts is an entirely foreign land.

I call upon the US government to resist this fishing expedition by the PSNI and to remember that the major consequence of this bid to invade an American college’s private archive will be to undermine a peace deal that was in no small way the product of careful American diplomacy and peace building. The United States has the power to invoke vital foreign policy interests in order to reject this PSNI action.

I also call upon Boston College to vigorously resist this action and to rally the rest of American academe in the cause of research confidentiality. It is no accident that this move comes hard on the heels of BC’s spokesman Jack Dunn’s public announcement that interviews could be returned. This action by the PSNI raises serious questions about the motivation and control of the police in Northern Ireland. Those in the PSNI who took and approved this decision could hardly have been unaware of the grave political consequences of their planned action.

For understandable reasons the disclosure that two weeks ago NBC News wrote to Judge William Young of the Federal District Court in Boston asking him to hand over subpoenaed interviews has created some excitement and comment elsewhere in the media.

But there is a simple reality to this story which may make it less dramatic or impactful than it appears at first glance. Judge Young cannot hand over that which he does not have. When he selected the interviews that were responsive to the subpoena the material was handed over to the Department of Justice for safekeeping until the legal arguments were ended. When that happened the PSNI sent over detectives to collect it and transport it back to Belfast.

Judge Young no longer has the material, nor does the DoJ or any government body. In that sense the NBC bid is moot. Copies were returned to Boston College and if NBC is to get its way then the interviews will have to be extracted from the college. Now, that would be interesting to watch.

Legal sources also tell me that on the grounds that this material is being used in criminal proceedings in which, in some cases, charges have not even been laid, it is highly unlikely that any court in the U.S. would agree to make it available to the media.

An interesting development but it may be much ado about very little.

Yesterday, after much negotiation with the paper, the Irish Times published my response to critics of the Boston Project who have attacked it on the grounds of bias in the choice of interviewees and in the choice of those involved in the project, myself included.

Indeed one critic, who claims to be an historian, had this to say about myself: “Ed Moloney……has spent much of his life attacking Gerry Adams” and this, in his view, made me so partisan as to be unfit to be in charge of such a project. I hope that amongst those who know me and my career path that this comment brought a smile to their faces.

He calls himself an historian but fails to conduct research even stretching back a few weeks. Had he consulted this website he would have found this article on April 20th describing how I nearly lost my job at the Irish Times back in 1982 when I predicted that Sinn Fein would win seats in an election to the new NI Assembly created that year.

If he had asked around, or even bothered to contact me, he would have learned that for most of my journalistic career (I hesitate to say ‘life’ since Gerry Adams and myself are the same age) it was my perceived closeness to Mr Adams and his colleagues that put it more in danger than any other single thing. But he didn’t.

Nor did he wonder how, if I had been so anti-Sinn Fein for “much of my life” I was able to persuade so many IRA men and women to talk to me and share confidential internal IRA documents when I researched and wrote ‘A Secret History of the IRA’? Or how it was, if I had been so virulently opposed to Mr Adams and his friends, I didn’t end up in a well paid, senior journalistic post in Ireland instead of emigrating to America so late in life? After all, opposition to the Provos during the pre-peace process years was a guaranteed path to career advancement in Ireland.

But he didn’t ask those questions. And he didn’t ask them not just because he is stupid, which he most certainly is, but because he was too eager to recycle Sinn Fein talking points, accepting and repeating them without question, to conduct proper research or think through what he was writing and saying. Much the same can be said of Martin Mansergh, Niall O’Dowd and Tim Pat Coogan who have assailed me and the project from the columns of O’Dowd’s website.

In my Irish Times piece I cited the example of Richard O’Rawe who had been forced into silence by a warning from Tom Hartley, one of Gerry Adams’ closest political advisers, that he could be shot if he told what he knew about the 1981 hunger strike negotiations with the British.

Richard kept quiet for ten years but then agreed to speak to the Boston Project. Then a remarkable thing happened, something that happens when a huge burden is lifted. Once he had been interviewed Richard wanted to tell his story to the world and in particular to the republican community who he felt had a right to know this other, dark side of a hunger strike that had been so central to their existence and political beliefs. Even though I warned him that the Provos would make his life hell, he was insistent; the world should know. And it was his right to do so.

And therein lies the real reason for all the bile and poison directed at the Boston Project by bumbling historians, by Mansergh and his confreres, by Danny Morrison and his team of black propagandists, by ‘Big Bobby’ Storey and his ‘We Haven’t Gone Away’ brigade: fear. Fear that the alternative history suppressed by threats, insults and painted walls will emerge to challenge the version that preserves the myths created by leaders and keeps dark secrets hidden.

It is ultimately about control of the narrative, control of the history that is told and taught. And that is the mark of the authoritarian, the cast of the censor, the stamp of the totalitarian.

Here, for those who have not yet read it, is the piece I wrote for the Irish Times:

In his seminal account of the 1981 IRA hunger strikes, Afterlives, Richard O’Rawe writes that when, in 1991, he canvassed the idea that he might go public with his story of what really happened during the protest, that someone close to the Sinn Féin leadership told him, “as a friend”, that if he did, he could be shot. He wrote: “While he never used the words ‘shot dead’, I nonetheless felt that that was implicit in his warning” (p66). And so, fearful of the consequences, he kept his mouth shut.

And he did, for over 10 years, until the Boston College project reached out to him and he agreed to be interviewed about his role as public relations officer for the IRA inmates during the protest. He found the interviews such a liberating experience that, against my advice that his safety could be at risk, he wrote Blanketmen, his first book about the prison protest. If I had had my way Richard O’Rawe’s story would have stayed secret until his death. But he was insistent it be told.

O’Rawe’s account of the hunger strike gave an entirely different account of events from the one peddled by the Sinn Féin leadership, which placed responsibility for all the deaths on Margaret Thatcher. In O’Rawe’s account the late prime minister was responsible for just four deaths, the republican leadership for six.

Essentially, O’Rawe’s story, which in subsequent years was substantially confirmed by contemporary British documents released in response to his books, went as follows. In July, 1981, after five months of protests and four deaths, the British offered to concede a majority of the hunger strikers’ demands. O’Rawe and his immediate superior, the IRA jail commander, Brendan McFarlane, recommended that the fast should end but they were overruled by Gerry Adams; the hunger strike continued and a further six prisoners went to lingering, painful deaths. (This has been denied by Brendan McFarlane and senior Sinn Féin figures such as Gerry Adams and the then Sinn Féin publicity chief Danny Morrison).

Motive
So what was the motive for overruling the prisoners’ leaders? One possible reason was that a continuation of the hunger strike helped ensure the success of Owen Carron in that August’s Westminster byelection in Fermanagh-South Tyrone caused by Bobby Sands’s death.

That was because preserving the hunger strike also kept in place a deal with the SDLP not to intervene electorally in the constituency, thereby avoiding a split in the nationalist vote to the unionists’ advantage. Carron’s win was entirely dependent on IRA prisoners still being on protest when polling happened. Had the prisoners accepted the British offer, the SDLP would have fielded a candidate and Carron would have lost.

Instead Carron’s victory paved the way for Sinn Féin’s electoral strategy and set in motion forces that, as I write, have placed Sinn Féin on the cusp of government on both sides of the Border.

That July 1981 episode thus assumes critical historical importance. Arguably it also explains why O’Rawe was warned to keep his mouth shut in 1991, why he was so badly abused when he did make his story public and why Sinn Féin, and those like Dr Martin Mansergh (“Adams episode sounds warning on peace process”, Irish Times, May 7th, 2014) who recycle Sinn Féin’s talking points, are so agitated about the Boston College project.

The truth is that without the Boston College project this crucial chapter in modern Irish history would have been buried – perhaps disappeared is a better word – and hidden from view at the point of a gun. The only account to survive would be the one that suits Sinn Féin best, the version that heaps all the blame on Thatcher and keeps the focus well and truly off the Sinn Féin leadership.
This story, and the Sinn Féin-led offensive against the Boston project, is about more than the character of the man who might be Ireland’s next tánaiste, although it is surely that as well. It is about who controls the narrative of the IRA’s part in over 30 years of violence in the North.
Just as Adams wishes the world to believe that he was never in the IRA, so he also wants those like Richard O’Rawe who dare challenge his control of that narrative, his version of events, to remain silent.
The current campaign of intimidation led by Sinn Féin against the Boston project is really aimed at anyone tempted to imitate our efforts by trying to explore the reality behind the propaganda.

Hypocrisy
Mansergh accuses the Boston project of hypocrisy when I wrote that it was carried out in a “professional and detached” way. But when Dr Anthony McIntyre approached Richard O’Rawe – and others – for an interview he carried a tape recorder in his hands, not a pistol behind his back. We sought accounts about life in the IRA in interviews freely given by former activists motivated only by a desire to tell the truth as they saw it.

Our crime was to unearth some accounts that were inconveniently at odds with the version of history that Sinn Féin wishes the world to believe and we interviewed people such as Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price who would be central in any narrative about the IRA. Not to have interviewed such people would have been remiss beyond words.
The logic of Mansergh’s critique of the Boston project is unavoidable. Should anyone wish to imitate our project, the potential interviewees should be asked one of two questions: do they believe Gerry Adams was in the IRA? Or, do they give unequivocal support to the peace process?
If they answer “Yes” to the first, and “No” to the second, or even hesitate in their answer (after all, one can favour peace, but dislike the process), then they will be excluded from recording their memories since they are, in Mansergh’s view, likely to be motivated by malice towards Adams or the policies he has helped put in place. Only in such a way can subversive, anti-peace sentiment be prevented from contaminating historical research.
That is the history telling of totalitarianism.