particular objective by violent means.” Moody was broadly supportive of the directive, but felt it had been applied in a heavy-handed manner that was constricting the supply of information. At the time of his firing, Moody told the Irish Times on 27 November 1972:“Much of our problems springs from a refusal to face unpalatable facts, an addiction to make believe, a tendency to prefer myths to the truth. But a new realism, a new questioning of case-hardened assumptions has emerged, and this has been greatly, perhaps decisively, encouraged and stimulated by the development of broadcasting. If the measure of freedom that the RTE has had is now to be drastically reduced, one of the first casualties will be the truth, and the process of awakening the public mind to the realities of the Irish predicament may be disastrously halted. We need more, not less, communication in Ireland”. In 1976, the first volume of The New History of Ireland dealing with Irish history from 1543 to 1691 was published under the editorship of Moody, Father F. X. Martin and Francis John Byrne. The project had been marred by major delays, but the critical reception to The New History of Ireland was very favourable. In 1974, Moody published The Ulster Question, 1603–1973 detailing with the troubled relationship between the Catholic community who tended to be Irish nationalists and the Protestant community who tended to be Unionists in Ulster. As someone from Northern Ireland living in the Irish republic, Moody was greatly concerned with and saddened by “the troubles” that broke out in Northern Ireland in 1968 as the state of low-level warfare was popularly known, and in his preface written in January 1974, Moody expressed the hope that the power-sharing deal reached in the Sunningdale Agreement would end "the troubles". By the time the book was published later that year, the Sunningdale Agreement had already collapsed. In the 1970s, Moody started researching the life of Michael Davitt, who founded the Irish Land League and published a biography Davitt and the Irish Revolution, 1846–82 in 1981. In a 1977 speech Irish History and Irish Mythology, Moody called for historians to end the promoting of what Moody called the “myths”, or “received views” which mix “fact and fiction”, which Moody argued was causing the violence in Northern Ireland. Moody labelled as “myths” the popular views about the establishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland,