A tape-recording of alleged phone conversations at RUC headquarters in Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1972 was first made public in Dublin the following year.
Part of the tape, which emerged last Thursday after it was given to a Derry Journal reporter, Eamon MacDermott, was originally played at a press conference given by Sinn Fein on Saturday, September 15th, 1973, in Dublin.
It was believed to have been the result of an IRA "bug" during events in Derry when 14 people died after being shot by the British army after a Civil Rights march on January 30th, 1972.
The military voices on the tape are thought to have been from a recording of a bugged phone in the communications room in what was then the RUC's Derry headquarters at Victoria Place.
A subsequent report in The Irish Times on September 17th, 1973 gave details of part of the conversation. A transcript was supplied to journalists of some of it.
The then Sinn Fein president, Mr Ruairi O Bradaigh, said at the press conference that the tape had not been made public earlier because the phone tapping was of such military value that it had been kept secret.
The voices of journalists were heard on the tape released this week. Mr Max Hastings, editor of the London Evening Standard, who was heard inquiring about the number of casualties on that day, Bloody Sunday, said yesterday that he was sure it was his voice on the tape.
"Obviously I have no knowledge of any part of the transcript other than that involving myself," he said in a statement. "But I am sure the conversation involving me is authentic because I was making a documentary for the BBC in Belfast at the time."
RTE confirmed that Mr Paddy Clancy was another of the journalists whose voice was heard on the tape. Mr Clancy, currently editor of the Irish Sun, and a presenter of RTE's It Says in The Papers, worked at the time for the Daily Telegraph.
Mr O Bradaigh, now president of Republican Sinn Fein, said yesterday he remembered being one of the people giving the press conference at which a tape was played which came from Derry. He recalled that British personnel were "gung-ho" about the killings and that there was a lot of static on the tapes. "I know that the then [Sinn Fein] leadership did all it could to put that particular tape into the public domain," Mr O Bradaigh said.
Part of the conversation printed in The Irish Times is similar to what emerged this week. The 1973 transcript has personnel saying: "I think it's gone badly wrong in the Rossville. The doctors have been at the hospital and they're pulling stiffs out there as fast as they can get them out."
"There's nothing wrong with that, eh?"
"Well there is because they're the wrong people. There are about nine, between nine and 15 killed by the paratroopers in the Rossville area, there are old women, children, God knows what. They are still going up there, I mean the pigs are just full of bodies . . . stiffs all over the place."
"And Malc?"
"Malc is involved with it. Malc was down there yes."