A RESEARCHER who recorded interviews with paramilitaries for Boston College says he would never have worked on the project if he knew police would be able to seize the tapes. Former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre recorded about 200 sessions with 26 republicans who spoke candidly of their involvement in the Troubles. The ex-paramilitaries agreed to take part under the assurance that their transcripts would not be published until after their deaths. However, detectives investigating the 1972 IRA murder of Jean McConville launched a successful legal bid to gain access to the archive stored at Boston College. The PSNI has since made a string of arrests, the latest being Sinn Fein president and Louth TD Gerry Adams. Mr McIntyre said he believed that his interviewees had a cast-iron guarantee from the university that their stories were secure. He said there was "no chance" he would have been involved in the five-year project if he knew how it would eventually be used by police. "There is no chance of me having done the project had I foreseen this. If I thought for a second that it was open to being seized, why would I do it? I would not have done it," he said. Mr McIntyre criticised the arrests made following the seizure of the Boston tapes and claimed the decision to detain Mr Adams was "politically motivated". He pointed to Mr Adams's arrest taking place the day after secretary of state Theresa Villiers ruled out a review into the 1971 Ballymurphy massacre, in which 11 people died during a British army operation in west Belfast. "I am disappointed that Gerry Adams has been arrested and I am disappointed that anyone has been arrested. I think it was a politically motivated arrest," the 56-year-old said. Mr McIntyre received £25,000 a year to interview republicans for the Boston College project, which was directed by writer and journalist Ed Moloney. A second researcher, Wilson McArthur, recorded loyalists who took part. Among those who agreed to be interviewed were former IRA commander Brendan 'The Dark' Hughes and Old Bailey bomber Dolours Price, who have both since died. Hughes said that Gerry Adams was a commander in the IRA and that the Sinn Fein president ordered the abduction, killing and secret burial of Jean McConville. His tapes were handed to police in 2011 just weeks after the PSNI applied for the interviews under the US-UK 'MLAT' treaty. "Boston College instead of trying to defend it just handed it over," said Mr McIntyre, a former life-sentence prisoner and west Belfast republican, who now lives in Co Louth. PSNI detectives also seized tapes of interviews with Dolours Price following a court ruling, believing that they could help in their investigation of Mrs McConville's murder. However, Mr McIntyre yesterday insisted that police would not have found any reference to the widowed mother-of-10 from his interviews with Price. "They certainly asked for Dolours Price, but Dolours Price and I did not discuss on tape the killing of Jean McConville," the father-of-two said.
