The death has taken place in New York of journalist Ed Moloney, who covered the Northern Ireland Troubles with distinction and was the author of a penetrating history of the IRA. He was 77.
Moloney’s death last Friday, after a short illness, was confirmed in a family statement on his blog, The Broken Elbow. He had lived in New York since 2000 after moving there for family reasons.
“Not only did Moloney’s journalism open him to attack from both sides and [offer] a close-up view of the worst horrors of the Troubles, it also brought him close to the victims and their families,” his family said.
He began reporting on the Troubles in 1978, becoming Northern editor of The Irish Times between 1981 and 1985 and Northern editor of the Sunday Tribune from 1987 until 2001.
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In a storied career that straddled some of the worst of the Northern violence, and peace under new powersharing arrangements, his work led many protagonists in the conflict to clash with him.
He was made Irish Journalist of the Year in 1999, one week after defeating an attempt by then Scotland Yard commissioner Sir John Stevens to force him into handing over notes of an interview with a loyalist paramilitary who alleged a police cover-up in the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.
The murder of Mr Finucane was one of the most notorious cases of security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. Moloney successfully argued before the High Court in Belfast that handing over his notes would destroy his own reputation as a journalist, breach journalistic ethics and do irreparable harm to all journalism in Northern Ireland.
Moloney’s family described how he was briefly a member of the Official IRA – in its political phase – during his early years in Belfast and later “survived several assassination attempts by that same group”.
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His work appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Economist, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, New Society and the Sunday Times.
“Ed Moloney was one of the most consequential journalists of his generation,” said the NUJ’s Irish secretary Séamus Dooley.
“He had an unyielding commitment to shining a light into the darkest corners of Northern Ireland’s troubled history.”
His work spanned the escalation of the conflict during the IRA hunger strike of 1981, the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and the first tentative moves towards peace that led to the ceasefires of 1994 and, eventually, the Good Friday pact of 1998.
His authoritative book, A Secret History of the IRA, was published to acclaim in 2002 and updated in 2007, two years after the paramilitary organisation declared its armed struggle was over.
The book described the pivotal leadership role of former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, casting him as the ruthless and unquestioned controller of the republican movement and described how he plotted peace behind the backs of the IRA army council.
Mr Adams, who has always denied ever being a member of the IRA, dismissed the book as “a mixture of innuendo, recycled claims, nodding and winking”.
The book also described the role of former taoiseach Charles Haughey in highly secret engagements with the IRA in the 1980s. “Haughey played a crucial and often undervalued part in the genesis and evolution of the peace process and I believe that without him the birth of the peace process would have been much more difficult,” Moloney wrote.
Moloney was co-author with Andy Pollak in 1986 of Paisley, an unauthorised biography of DUP founder Ian Paisley, and was the sole author in 2008 of Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat?
When the conflict ended, he was director the Belfast Project at Boston College, which collected oral interviews with republican and loyalist militants that were to be released only after they died.
This led to the 2010 book Voices from the Grave, featuring notable interviews with republican Brendan Hughes and unionist David Ervine, and an award-winning TV documentary, Voices from the Grave Two Men’s War in Ireland.
However, the Belfast Project was shut down and interviews returned to participants years after the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), supported by the US Department of Justice, sought confiscation of the interviews.
He was co-writer and co-producer in 2018 of the documentary I, Dolours, on the life of IRA hunger striker Dolours Price.
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Moloney was born in England and educated there and well as Germany, Gibraltar and Malaysia. He was survivor of childhood polio, which, his family said, was an experience “that shaped his personality and worldview”.
He moved to Belfast to attend Queen’s University, developing deep insights into republicanism and Irish politics that would inform his work for decades.
It was in Belfast that Moloney met his wife of nearly 50 years, Joan McKiernan. Their son Ciarán was born and raised there. They survive him.
