Northern Ireland Troubles journalist and author dies

The journalist and author Ed Moloney, who was known for his reporting on the Northern Ireland Troubles and research into the Provisional IRA, has died aged 77.

His family confirmed the news on Mr Moloney’s blog The Broken Elbow, saying he died on Friday in New York after a brief illness.

Mr Moloney was a former northern editor for both The Irish Times and Sunday Tribune. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian among others.

In 2002, his book A Secret History of the IRA was published. It went on to become a bestseller.

Mr Moloney also co-wrote an unauthorised biography of unionist leader Ian Paisley, which was published in 1986, before he authored a new edition in 2008 under the title Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat?

In later years, he was the director of Boston College’s Belfast Project, known as the Boston tapes, which collected interviews with former republican and loyalist paramilitaries with the aim of creating an oral history of the Troubles.

Seamus Dooley, the assistant general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) in Ireland, described him as “one of the most consequential journalists of his generation”.

“He had an unyielding commitment to shining a light into the darkest corners of Northern Ireland’s troubled history,” wrote Mr Dooley on social media site X.