[3] At the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Moody's strongest subjects were the sciences and Latin, but one of his teachers, Archie Douglas turned his attention to history.
[9] The book was generally ignored in England, but was greeted with welcome reviews in Ireland, as a trail-brazing work that opened up new avenues for studying Irish history.
[10] During his time in London, Moody met his future wife Margaret Robertson and often spoke on the subject of Irish history with R. Dudley Edwards.
[13] In the 1930s he ...resolved to initiate a 'scientific' historiographical revolution that would give historians the power to dissolve the popular myths that kept the different communities of Ireland divided.
[15] A man with an intense work ethic and much energy, Moody wanted to bring up the standard of history in Ireland, which he felt needed improvements.
[17] In his obituary, Father F.X Martin noted that Moody was raised in the Plymouth Brethren, but he found his true faith as an adult when he became a Quaker.
[33] In 1962, Moody in a presidential speech before the Irish Historical Society called for a “New History of Ireland” that would take the form of a 12–14 volume work that would cover all aspects of the political, economic, cultural, social, legal, religious and military history of Ireland that would require the collaboration of dozens of scholars with financial support from the Irish state.
In 1972, the Irish government fired the entire council of the Irish Broadcasting Authority for supposedly violating a directive to not air “any matter that could be calculated to promote the aims or activities of any organisation which engages in, promote, encourages or advocates the attaining of any particular objective by violent means.”[37] 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.
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.
[42] 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".
[51] Moody further argued the claim there was a genocidal plan by the Irish elite to exterminate all of the Protestant settlers has no basis in fact, and the massacres were spontaneous explosions of hate.
[53] Moody stated the "myth" of the 1641 rebellion as a premeditated genocide organised by the Catholic Church that took hundreds of thousands of lives was being used to promote the "siege mentality" and sectarian hatred that was hindering peace efforts in Northern Ireland.
[57] Likewise, Moody attacked the "myth" of a Protestant community that was solidly and unconditionally Unionist throughout the centuries, noting the Scottish settlers in Ulster resisted giving oaths of allegiance to King Charles I in 1639; that many of the leaders of the Society of United Irishmen were Protestant; and the ferocious denunciations of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone by the Orange Order when he disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869, which led to some Orange lodges to call for a repeal of the Union.
[59] More recently, Moody noted that several Unionist groups, upset with measures by the British government, to end discrimination against the Catholic minority of Ulster, had been speaking of having Northern Ireland break away from the United Kingdom to form a new state that would guarantee Protestant supremacy, which Moody used to suggest again that most Unionists had only a "conditional" loyalty to the United Kingdom.
[68] Moody stated it was only the frustration caused by the inability of the government of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to bring in home rule as he had promised in the face of opposition from Ulster unionists that led some Irish nationalists to turn to violence.
[69] Moody further argued the great sea-change in the public's views occurred between the Easter Rising in 1916 and the election of 1918, when Sinn Féin won the majority of seats outside of Ulster on a platform of winning independence and a republic by "any means necessary".
[75] Moody's leading critics were Brendan Bradshaw and Desmond Fennell who accused him of essentially white-washing the history of British rule in Ireland.
[76] Bradshaw wrote at best, Moody was simply naïve, and his call for a more objective history served to sanitise readers to the injustices and suffering bore by the Irish people during the long rule of the Crown.