US will not oppose bid to delay IRA tape handover

THE US Justice Department has said it will not oppose an application to postpone the handing over of interviews with former republican paramilitaries to the PSNI.

The application had been made by those involved in Boston College’s “Belfast Project”, an oral history of the Troubles. This was writer and journalist Ed Maloney and researcher Anthony McIntyre.

A full hearing on the matter will now take place on January 24.

Last year, the PSNI began a legal bid to gain access to the interviews. Its detectives say they could hold valuable information concerning the cases of people murdered and disappeared by the IRA — notably the murder of Belfast mother of 10 Jean McConville.

Ms McConville was abducted from her home in Belfast in 1972 by a gang of IRA members on suspicion of being an informant to the British army. After being tortured, she was shot in the back of the head and buried on a beach on Shelling Hill, Co Louth. Her body was not found until 2003.

The PSNI are particularly interested in an interview given by Dolours Price over a decade ago.

Ms Price was one of 26 former IRA members to give a series of interviews — between 2001 and 2006 — as part of the research study.

It is understood Ms Price allegedly implicates Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in Ms McConville’s death.

Mr Adams has repeatedly denied the allegations that he ordered the killing.

The study participants were given an undertaking that their identities and the contents of the tapes would be secret until their deaths.

This is the first time police have tried to use the college’s oral history collection to build criminal cases.

The college has already turned over tapes and files of interviews given by Brendan Hughes, a former IRA member who died in 2008.

Before his death, Mr Hughes claimed Mr Adams gave the orders to kill and bury Ms McConville after the IRA accused her of being an informer.