Born: 1948
Died: October 17th, 2025
Award-winning journalist and author Ed Moloney, who has died in New York aged 77, was an outstanding chronicler of the Northern Ireland Troubles.
Writing for several outlets during a lengthy career, notably for this newspaper, the Sunday Tribune and, before either, Hibernia and Magill magazines, he was noted for the quality of his sources on all sides of the conflict and, consequently, the authority of the information he provided his readers.
He authored, and co-authored, several groundbreaking books, including the exceptionally detailed A Secret History of the IRA.
In later life, he expanded his work portfolio into TV documentaries, the controversial and ultimately discontinued Boston College Belfast Project, as well as an online blog, The Broken Elbow.
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Famously grumpy at times, editors and friends tolerated his occasional mood swings because of the quality of his work. Reactions were tempered also by the knowledge that Moloney endured lasting pain caused by childhood polio and arthritis. He wore leg calipers and walked with the aid of a stick for much of his life.
Edmund (Ed) Moloney was born in England in 1948 and, despite living most of his later life in Ireland and the United States, he never really lost his English accent. He spent some childhood years living with his mother in Alexandria, a small town about an hour northwest of Glasgow, while his father worked away.
Many youthful years were consequently spent living in Germany, Gibraltar and Malaysia before, as a young man, he attended the Queen’s University in Belfast – his introduction to Northern Ireland and all its ethno-political complexities.
He was ferociously forensic. He would give you the story that wasn’t necessarily the story you were looking for – and usually it was better. He had incredible contacts inside republicanism and loyalism
— Matt Cooper
Attracted to the leftist politics of Sinn Féin, the Workers Party, (later transformed into Democratic Left before merging with the Labour Party), he joined the Official IRA, which was then concentrating on political rather than paramilitary activities.
“He was their education officer in south Belfast,” recalls fellow journalist, Belfast resident Hugh Jordan. “He gave short lectures to young people who weren’t really interested in them.”
After a two-year stint teaching English as a foreign language to students in Libya, Moloney returned to Belfast where his interests soon focused on the growing Troubles. He devoted the rest of his career, and life, to reporting those events and their consequences.
Following his death, former Magill editor Vincent Browne described Moloney as “perhaps the most brilliant Irish journalist of the last 50 years”.
What is beyond question is that he was one of a very small cohort of reporters who developed deep and highly placed sources among both republicans and loyalists, and who devoted almost all of their professional lives to reporting the Troubles and their consequences, as opposed to being posted to Belfast for a time before moving on to the next assignment.
“He had superb contacts in the [Provisional] IRA,” says Jordan. “There was no one to touch him in their understanding of this place.”
Moloney was Northern editor of this newspaper from 1980 to 1985 before leaving on unhappy terms. Conor Brady, the paper’s editor from 1986 to 2002, has no doubt, however, as to his significance as a Troubles reporter. “He made a major contribution. He was always extremely well informed and had a very clear strategic perspective over the peace process.”
Moloney moved to the Sunday Tribune as Northern editor from 1987 to 2001, where the weekly news cycle was perhaps more suited to his style of deeply researched and analytical journalism.
“He was ferociously forensic,” recalls former Tribune editor and broadcaster Matt Cooper. “He would give you the story that wasn’t necessarily the story you were looking for – and usually it was better. He had incredible contacts inside republicanism and loyalism.”
His first book, Paisley, was published in 1986 and was written with former Irish Times colleague Andy Pollak. It stands as an important portrait of the Free Presbyterian Church founder and Bible-imbued-rabble-rousing firebrand preacher Ian Paisley in his “no surrender” days.
A later, solo-authored follow-up volume, Paisley: from demagogue to democrat, traced the DUP leader’s transformation to partner-in-government with Sinn Féin.
But Moloney’s outstanding volume is undoubtedly his groundbreaking A Secret History of the IRA, published in 2002. Over 600 pages, and a further 140 pages of appendixes and source notes, Moloney describes in detail the creation of the modern IRA and the former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams’s role in it.
While Adams continues to deny he was in the IRA, the book – which he dismissed as “a mixture of innuendo, recycled claims, nodding and winking” – remains in print with those assertions unaltered.
Moloney’s credo as a reporter/writer is perhaps best relayed by a preface to the 2007 edition of the book: “The job of a correspondent, after all, is to inform and increase understanding,” he wrote.
Reviewing that edition, The Guardian newspaper described it as “undoubtedly the best history of Ireland’s ... most enduring paramilitary movement ever to be written. It is a brave and mercilessly honest project that will stand the test of time”.
In June 1999, Moloney reported in the Sunday Tribune a version of the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, given to him nine years earlier by Ulster Defence Association gunman and police informant Billy Stobie. Police in Northern Ireland got a court order directing Moloney to hand over his interview notes, but he refused to comply.
[ Moloney victory marks `great day for journalism'Opens in new window ]
Facing jail for contempt, Moloney refused to budge and eventually, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland ruled in Moloney’s favour. Shortly after, Moloney was named journalist of the year.
Commenting on his death, National Union of Journalists assistant general secretary Seamus Dooley said Moloney would be remembered for his “courage, dogged determination and unyielding commitment to shining a light into the darkest corners of Northern Ireland’s troubled history ... [and standing by] the NUJ code of conduct in refusing to hand over notebooks relating to the Pat Finucane murder”.
In 2000 Moloney moved to New York, partly to help care for the mother of his wife of 50 years, Joan McKiernan, and partly to access pain relief unavailable in Ireland. While living in the United States, he directed Boston College’s Belfast Project, also known as the Boston Tapes, an archive of oral interviews with republican and loyalist militants who had been active during the Troubles.
The project eventually foundered in acrimony over confidentiality agreements and other issues, but material obtained formed the basis of a book, Voices from the Grave, which features interviews from the tapes with IRA man Brendan Hughes and loyalist politician and former UVF member David Ervine.
A documentary titled Voices From the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland, which aired on RTÉ in 2010, won the best television documentary prize at the annual Irish Film and Television Awards in 2011.
[ Jean McConville’s murder, the Boston tapes, Gerry Adams and the Ivor Bell trialOpens in new window ]
In 2018, Moloney co-wrote and co-produced another award-winning documentary I, Dolours, which told the story of IRA volunteer and hunger striker Dolours Price, based partly on material from the Boston Project.
The Moloneys were enthusiastic pet lovers, adopting rescue dogs for most of their married lives together. Living in the south Belfast Malone Road area and when not working or listening to the radio (an incessant companion), Ed relaxed in the Botanic Gardens by throwing a frisbee for Brochen, an early adoptee.
Kobe, their latest adoptee in New York, received similar playful attention.
Moloney met and married Joan McKiernan in Belfast. Their son, Ciarán, was born and raised there and now lives in Montreal with his wife, Stephanie.
In death, Ed Moloney asked that he be remembered through donations to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative which is based in Geneva, Switzerland.
