IRA prisoner behind the notorious Boston tapes shares daring claims in new podcast

The Boston Tapes co-ordinator and former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre plays a central role in a new chart topping Daily Mail podcast on the history of controversial Irish political party Sinn Fein.

The Boston tapes are secret recordings in which ex-paramilitaries talk about their role during the decades of violence in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. 

The recordings were made on behalf of the US university, Boston College, as part of an academic project to create an oral history of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Anthony McIntyre – was himself jailed for a terrorist killing – interviewed some of the country’s most infamous Irish Republican Army terrorists. 

The project became highly controversial as police in Northern Ireland later gained access to the tapes for use as evidence in ongoing murder inquiries.

Those police investigations included one into the 1972 murder of mother-of-10 Jean McConville. 

So heinous – even by the IRA’s standards – was Ms McConville’s murder that she became one of the Disappeared. The Disappeared were killed, mostly for being alleged informers to the authorities. 

But unlike most murdered IRA informers – who were left the side of the road as a warning to potential traitors – their bodies were hidden and never returned to their families.

Mr McIntyre gives an account of his career as an IRA man from the early seventies to his role in the Hunger Strikes in the H Block prison. 

He also emerges in the new Daily Mail podcast series – From Bomb to Ballot: The History of Sinn Fein – as the chief critic of Gerry Adams, the former President of Sinn Fein. 

In interviews for the podcast he reinforces the allegations of others in the Boston Tapes project that Gerry Adams played a central role in the Disappeared events. He claims in From Bomb To Ballot, that Adams used ‘dead republicans’ to further his political career.

In episode 3 Mr McIntyre says: ‘If there’s martyrs coming out, if there’s people dying, he’ll [Adams] happily carry coffins at the end of his political career if it’s getting him votes and enhances his political career.

‘Adams never carries coffins. Adams uses coffins to carry him. And he has surfed on the coffins of IRA volunteers and IRA hunger strikers to a career.’

In 2014, the PSNI made arrested Gerry Adams as part of the Jean McConville murder inquiry. The case was not pursued against Adams and he had nothing to fear from any disclosure and denied all of the accusations levelled at him.

During four days of questioning, the Boston tapes formed part of the material that detectives put to him about his alleged role in Mrs McConville’s death.

Mr Adams, who was released without charge, criticised the PSNI for ‘political policing’ and said the Boston tapes had ‘formed the mainstay for my arrest’.

The Boston Tapes and the Disappeared recently gained worldwide attention when Disney + released a dramatization of plight of victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Say Nothing, based on the book by Patrick Radden O’Keeffe.

Much of what we know about activities of the IRA in relation to the Disappeared comes from the Boston Tapes.

Boston College launched its Belfast Project in 2001, three years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, an international peace accord which effectively marked an end to the Troubles.

By that stage, hundreds of paramilitary prisoners had already been granted early release from jail under the terms of the 1998 agreement.

The deal was that the former paramilitaries would tell their stories in secret, on the understanding that the recordings and transcripts would only be made public after their deaths.

Boston College tried keep its tapes secret, but the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) launched an international court battle to force academics to hand over the material.

The oral history project was directed by the Irish writer and journalist Ed Moloney, with the interviews carried out by two researchers.

Loyalists’ testimonies were recorded by Wilson McArthur, while republicans were interviewed by Anthony McIntyre.

Among the participants were former IRA commander Brendan Hughes and former IRA member Dolours Price.

Brendan ‘the Dark’ Hughes spoke of his former close friend, Gerry Adams, claiming the former Sinn Féin leader was once the overall commander of the IRA’s Belfast brigade.

He also claimed Adams had controlled his own squad within the IRA, known by the organisation as ‘the Unknowns’. The Unknowns, said Hughes, were responsible for the deaths of the Disappeared.

In 2010, former IRA bomber Dolours Price gave an interview to a newspaper in which she admitted she had taken part in the Boston Tapes.

Price claimed to have been the person who drove IRA murder victim Jean McConville to the place where she was shot dead.

McIntyre now faces pursuit by the Northern Ireland police, who want to gain access to his own testimonies in the Boston Tapes about the IRA.

McIntyre tells From Bomb To Ballot of his own close brush with starving to death, like the ten other young men who died from hunger strike in Long Kesh prison in 1981. The men were seeking political status as prisoners, through hunger strike. From Bomb To Ballot chronicles the harrowing story of Bobby Sands – who was elected to the UK parliament while in jail – and his fellow hunger strikers.

McIntyre had been convicted of a drive-by shooting. It was deemed by the Republican leadership to be a sectarian crime; and not one likely to garner the sympathies of the wider public.

‘They didn’t want anyone on it who could be conceived of as a sectarian killer,’ McIntyre tells the podcast.

‘It would be too easy for the authorities to outmaneuver them in a propaganda battle. I mean, once they died, there were going to be martyrs anyway, but they, in the build up to them dying, they wanted the maximum amount of publicity. 

‘This is why Bobby was to be portrayed as the golden boy, the poet, the thinker. You almost thought, from some of the stuff, that Bobby was a pacifist.’