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| Ed Moloney |
For many years I had been familiar with the journalism of Ed Moloney, but the very first time he was ever raised in a personal conversation I had was on 08 July 1999. That day I was having a drink with professor Paul Bew in Dukes Hotel in Belfast, and I was telling him that I thought the Sunday Business Post newspaper had the best coverage of affairs in Northern Ireland, the articles of Tom McGuirk in particular. After all that paper under editor Damien Kiberd had been the only mainstream newspaper to campaign against the Belfast Agreement with its ‘Not A Deal For Nationalist Ireland’ editorial on 12 April 1998. Bew disagreed and told me that the best journalist was in fact Ed Moloney and The Sunday Tribune was much more interesting. He was to have lunch with him the following day (or shortly after, I can’t recall), some time before he was to spend a year teaching at Boston College. Possibly they were to discuss what later became known as The Boston Tapes project.
The very first time I met Ed Moloney in person was on 03 March 2000 at the public launch of Fourthwrite, the journal of the Irish Republican Writers Group at the Conway Mill in Belfast. I am not sure I was actually able to talk to him on that occasion. Brendan Hughes had just made an important speech, and the attention of the journalists was concentrated on that rather than chatting with obscure people like myself who just turned up. But it was on 15 April 2000 that for the first time I had quite lengthy discussions with him. On that date, a former republican prisoner who knew Ed very well for many years as well as a former member of the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party, who at the time were both completing post-graduate theses under the late James Daly at the Department of Scholastic Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast as well as myself went up to Ed Moloney’s house near the Cranmore bus stop on the Lisburn Road in Belfast. Ed drove us all up to Monaghan to the Ex Prisoners Assistance Committee (EXPAC) - at that time chaired by Anthony McIntyre and Tommy McKearney- Annual General Meeting in Monaghan. This was an interesting meeting at which I met Carrie Twomey for the very first time. Ed drove us back to Belfast, up to the Felons’ Club and The Gravediggers (of capitalism?) where we had another pint for the revolution. We had hours of discussions about various topics.
If this occasion kind of stands out for me, later ones did not leave much of an impression. For instance after the split in the Irish Republican Writers Group on 10 March 2001, I recall that during a dinner with Anthony McIntyre in the Morning Star in Belfast on 12 May 2001, Ed had explicitly deplored the degeneration of the Writers Group. However, far more colourful was the wedding of Anthony McIntyre and Carrie Twomey in Belfast on 07 May 2002. I can’t recall if Ed was there when the legal ceremony was performed in Belfast City Hall. After that we all had to go to The Green Hut in Turf Lodge. Dolours Price drove Davy Carlin, the Spanish academic Rogelio Alonso and myself to the venue. In the car, Davy Carlin and I had an argument as to wether the “law of value” applied to the so-called “Asiatic Mode of Production”. How Dolours put up with this nonesense, I do not know! At the Green Hut, I happened to be seated beside Joan McKiernan, who was Ed’s wife. Ed was probably nearby. Upon learning she had been a leading Cliffite I accused her of not being an orthodox Bolshevik Leninist standing in programmatic continuity with the theses and resolutions of the first four congresses of the communist international and the 1938 transitional programme for arguing the centrality of permanent arms economy, state capitalism and deflected permanent revolution rather than the correct general crisis of capitalism, degenerated workers state and permanent revolution perspective. She was only saved from this Marxist inquisition by the appearance of John McAnulty with whom I raised the topic of security and the Fourth International and how Hansen and Novack had colluded in the assassination of Trotsky. Such were the joys of some of the conversations at Mackers and Carrie’s wedding! It is only when Brendan Hughes and his partner arrived that some peace was brought to the table.
On 11 December 2001, in a review of Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston’s biography of Martin McGuinness in The Sunday Times, Paul Bew wrote: "Ed Moloney's authoritative and devastating Penguin History of the IRA is just around the corner". This was the very first time I had become aware of Ed Moloney’s book which was published in 2002 as A Secret History of the IRA. I bought the book on 30 September 2002 as soon as I saw it for the very first time. Upon first reading, the book was quite different to what I had expected. I had thought the book would have named who Stakeknife was. I was not alone in this. A conversation with QUB academic Richard English in the winter of 2002-2003 indicated he had similar expectations. My review of Ed’s book was published in The Blanket on 18 March 2003 under the title ‘Disturbing Secrets’. But this was a book I only had half digested at the time. I have re-read A Secret History of the IRA four times in its entirety, and just sections of it many more times. I have to say that I got far more from Ed’s book when I re-read it than when I had initially bought the book. This is especially true when I bought the second edition on 03 July 2007. If today I had to write an article about Ed’s masterpiece it would be different from the 2003 piece.
The last time I ever saw Ed Moloney in person was on 08 March 2003 at Anthony McIntyre’s house in Springhill Rise in Belfast. It was a very weird occasion as both signed to be so-called “guarantors” to a new property I was moving into. Also, that very morning Anthony McIntyre had received an advanced copy of Richard English's Armed Struggle A Political History of the IRA which had been a highly expected book.
After Ed Moloney permanently moved to the United States of America, our contacts became purely online, whether through email or Facebook messages. The Sunday Tribune was no longer published as a newspaper and Ed has to a large extent retired from his career as a journalist. But he still produced excellent pieces. This was particularly the case of his essay ‘The Peace Process and Journalism’ which I read during the winter 2006-2007. (2) This essay was so good I have quoted it in most of my published pieces since then. This essay about journalism and the peace process did what Liz Curtis’ 1983 Ireland The Propaganda War or David Miller’s 1994 Don’t Mention The War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and The Media were able to to during the war years. Greg McLaughlin & Stephen Baker (2010) The Propaganda of Peace: The Role of Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process were able to produce a good study but not from an actual media participant like Moloney did. I believe this is one of Ed’s best articles.
While I had been aware of the Boston Project, I did not have any significant involvement in it. I bought the book Voices From The Grave on 30 March 2010, but this was not a book that had a major impact on me. As opposed to the Secret History, it is not a book that I have re-read a couple of times. However the film I, Dolours had much more of an impact. I went to watch it with my friend Michelle on 07 September 2018 at the cinema complex in Belfast’s Dublin Road which today no longer exists. The film seemed to me sufficiently important for DVD copies to be available. There is a long series of Facebook messages between me and Ed Moloney about the possibility of creating DVDs of the I, Dolours film. I am old fashioned enough to still be using CDs and DVDs!
On 29 June 2018 I contacted Ed Moloney via Facebook to ask for his endorsement for my book Peace or Pacification? I sent him the draft document of the book. On 25 July 2018 he replied:
“i think it is very good. Will not make you any friends though but that is a mark of achievement.....”
On the same day he sent me the following endorsement:
Liam Ó Ruairc has written an important, revelatory analysis of the peace process in Northern Ireland which I am confident will take its place among the best books written about this consequential period in Anglo-Irish history. His underlying thesis is that what has happened in the near thirty years or so since the IRA recognized the southern state and embarked on a journey to constitutionalism is less a peace process and more a pacification process in which the republicans and the British co-operated to drain and enfeeble the vital ideological juices which had sustained resistance to partition for so long. The war in Ireland began with republicans and their allies abroad viewing the NI situation as a relic of British colonialism and ended with the militants accepting that it was really just a struggle over cultural identity; in the process republicans have been drained of their radicalism and now subscribe entirely to the neo-liberalism panacea. It is impossible to read this book and not wonder at the scale of the British triumph. The companion to this book, explaining how British intelligence so completely overwhelmed the IRA, has yet to be written. Until then Ó Ruairc’s fine work will do very nicely.
Of the six endorsements I received , I believe this one is the best.
On 13 August 2019 Ed Moloney sent me his postal address in the Bronx to send him a hard copy of my book once it was commercially available.
While Ed Moloney was now living in the United States and was no longer at the centre of the Irish journalistic scene, he still produced relevant material on his The Broken Elbow Blog. Our first exchange regarding that blog took on 18 March 2011, as I actually was suffering from a broken left elbow. Every week from now on I would have a look at his blog. During the same period Ed was also following my Irish Republican Education Forum Facebook group. On 09 April 2015, The Broken Elbow had an article entitled: “Adams & McConville: First The Magazine Piece. Now The Book. Next The Movie?” I did not pay any attention to this piece at the moment. As readers will understand this piece related to Patrick Radden Keefe, whose work would lead to a best selling book and a television series, but at that time the importance of Radden Keefe’s work was not clear. It is only when on 04 November 2018, I bought Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe that I became aware of him and his work. For various reasons I was not able to read and study this book properly before many months, but in the meantime I had become aware that Ed Moloney was challenging many of its conclusions. On 2 May 2019, Ed Moloney’s article “An American Reporter in Belfast: How a New Yorker Writer Got So Much Wrong in His Bestselling Book On The Troubles” published in Counterpunch raised hard hitting questions about Radden Keefe’s book. (3) From that time Ed’s blog had many articles about fairly technical questions such as British Army radios at the time of Jane McConville’s “Disappearance”. To put my cards on the table, I have to say that I am more convinced by Ed Moloney’s version of events than Patrick Radden Keefe.
Over the last few months of his life, I was trying to find what Ed Moloney’s opinion was of the Disney TV series of Radden Keefe’s book was or Martin Dillon’s new claims about the assassination of Jean
McConville. Although he was ill I did not realize he was dying. When he passed away in late October, my impression was that the Irish equivalent of John Pilger and Robert Fisk died. If Ed Moloney’s wife and son lost a brilliant human being, journalism has lost one of its best voices.
Notes
Notes
(1) For examples of obituaries, see: Outstanding Chronicler of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Irish Times, 25 October 2025. In the view of the author of this article, the best article about his journalism is: Suzanne Breen, 'No saint, but this was a colossus of NI journalism - his rows with Dublin editors are legendary', Belfast Telegraph, 22 October 2025.
(2) Ed Moloney (2006), The Peace Process and Journalism, in: Britain & Ireland: Lives Entwined II, London: The British Council, 65-82
(3) Ed Moloney, An American Reporter in Belfast: How a New Yorker Writer Got So Much Wrong in His Bestselling Book On The Troubles, Counterpunch, 02 May 2019,
⏩ Liam Ó Ruairc is the former co-editor of The Blanket.
