TRANSCRIPTS OF AN interview with prominent Irish Republican and former IRA member Dolours Price, carried out as part of a Boston College project, have been handed over to police in Northern Ireland.
Price, who died in January, and other former IRA members were interviewed between 2001 and 2006 as part of The Belfast Project – a resource for journalists, scholars and historians studying the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The oral history project involved academics, journalists and historians conducting interviews with former republicans and loyalists about their activities during the long conflict, including Price who participated in the car bombing of London’s Old Bailey in 1973 which injured over 200 people.
In interviews Price repeatedly described Adams as her IRA commander in Catholic west Belfast in the early 1970s when the illegal organisation was secretly abducting, executing and burying suspected informers in unmarked graves. Adams rejects the charges.
PSNI legal action
In 2011 the PSNI launched a legal battle with Boston College to secure the audiotaped interviews with Price detailing her IRA career to see if they contain evidence relating to unsolved crimes.
In particular, the PSNI sought access to the transcripts as part of its investigation into the disappearance of Jean McConville, a mother-of-ten who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972.
In June, a US appeals court ordered that the PSNI be given access to only a limited number of interviews held on tapes included in Boston College’s oral history project. The First Circuit ruled that only those that deal directly with the disappearance of Jean McConville in 1972 can be handed over to police in Northern Ireland. The decision reduces the number of interviews to be handed over as a result of subpoenas served on the academic researchers from 85 to 11.
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