Belfast Project archive

The Belfast Project archive was intended to preserve candid oral histories of the Troubles while protecting participants from prosecution and retaliation. Built around the promise that testimony would remain sealed until contributors had died, it became a contested collection: recordings meant for future scholarship were sought by police, delivered to investigators, and invoked in criminal proceedings. Its history exposes the gap between what an archive promises, what its custodians can guarantee, and what testimony can establish in court.

Conception and purpose

The archive grew from Ed Moloney’s proposal that BC document the conflict through interviews with people who had taken part in it. The obstacle was not simply finding interviewees. The IRA remained illegal, acknowledging membership could lead to prosecution, and disclosure to outsiders could bring the accusation of being an informer. Participants also feared one another. Moloney’s proposed answer was to record people while their memories were still fresh, then keep their accounts unavailable until after their deaths, when they could no longer be prosecuted or punished by former comrades.

The plan depended on trust as much as storage. Academic interviewers might have struggled to persuade former gunmen to speak, so Moloney proposed asking former paramilitaries to conduct the interviews. Anthony McIntyre, himself a former IRA member and prisoner, interviewed republicans; Wilson McArthur conducted the loyalist interviews. Their shared background made the conversations possible, but also gave the resulting archive a personal and politically charged character: these were not detached accounts gathered by researchers with no connection to the conflict.

The project’s architects kept its existence known to very few people. The archive was conceived in the hopeful aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, yet its subject remained dangerous and politically sensitive. Its creators did not settle in advance who would eventually be allowed to consult the interviews. The phrase future students of BC suggested scholarly access, but the college’s history department had not even been told the archive existed. When a professor arranged for a student to consult interviews, Moloney objected and proposed that applications be sent to him for vetting. The uncertainty was consequential: confidentiality, publication, and access had never been governed by a settled, commonly understood protocol.

Recording and protecting testimony

McIntyre worked discreetly, using encrypted email to communicate with Moloney and trying to leave as little paper trail as possible. He carried a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack and met interviewees more than once; conversations with an individual could total ten hours or more over several sittings. After an interview, a trusted typist prepared a transcript. McIntyre then sent the recording and transcript to BC, where Bob O’Neill placed them in the Treasure Room of the John J. Burns Library, described as the library’s most secure area.

The materials were also separated from participants’ names. Recordings and transcripts were labeled with letters rather than identities; only separate contract documents connected each code to the person who had spoken. Those identity forms were not sent electronically but hand-delivered to O’Neill. This arrangement reduced the chance that a routine copy of an interview would identify its source, but it made the archive dependent on the security and completeness of two distinct sets of records. BC later lost some of the forms, including the one that would have linked code Z to Ivor Bell.

For several years the arrangement worked as a covert oral-history project. McIntyre sought out republicans who had become estranged from Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin, since asking people close to the leadership could expose the project and put participants at risk. One interviewee he had known since meeting him in prison in 1974 was Brendan Hughes. In the archive he appeared under code C. The intimacy between interviewer and subject gave the conversations an easy, personal quality, but the same closeness and the use of coded identities would later complicate attempts to establish what the recordings could prove.

The confidentiality promise meets a subpoena

The archive’s protections were tested when the United States Department of Justice relayed a request from the Police Service of Northern Ireland under a mutual legal assistance treaty. A subpoena demanded the original interviews of Hughes and Dolours Price in connection with an alleged murder. McIntyre protested that total confidentiality and protection had been central to the reason for placing the recordings at a United States university. BC’s president, William Leahy, initially assured the project’s organizers that the college would not allow interviewers or interviews to be compromised.

The assurances had never received the legal scrutiny participants might have assumed. When Moloney prepared the contracts in 2001, he suggested that O’Neill refer the language to BC’s lawyers. O’Neill said he would do so, but no lawyer reviewed the agreements, and they did not explain that a court order could override confidentiality. The promise could therefore be absolute in the participants’ understanding while remaining legally vulnerable. The college eventually turned over Hughes’s interviews, reasoning that he had died and that much of his account had already appeared in Moloney’s book. Unlike the published book, however, the recordings and transcripts supplied to authorities were unredacted.

A second subpoena sought material relating to the abduction and death of Jean McConville. BC argued that disclosure would breach its agreements, threaten the safety of people connected with the project, impair academic freedom, and endanger the peace process. The United States government countered that the archive was not protected by academic privilege and that its organizers had promised more than they could legally guarantee. After the second subpoena arrived, a federal judge ordered the interviews delivered to the court for review. BC chose not to appeal that ruling at the time, prompting Moloney and McIntyre to retain their own lawyers.

Selection, identity, and evidentiary limits

Judge William Young asked McIntyre to help identify interviews that concerned McConville. Because the recordings were coded, McIntyre knew who the participants were, but refused to assist, arguing that doing so would cross the boundary between academic research and police investigation. O’Neill also declined, saying he had not read the interviews. The judge instead read the republican transcripts himself over several days around Christmas. He found that six participants mentioned McConville, including one who did so only in passing, and authorized the release of recordings associated with five.

Dolours Price was among them, but the distinction between her different interviews became crucial. In roughly fifteen hours of recorded conversations with McIntyre, she never mentioned McConville. Moloney and McIntyre emphasized that absence in their public and legal statements. Yet Price had also discussed the disappearance in detail in separate interviews with Moloney. After speaking with a reporter in 2010, she agreed to a more detailed interview on the same understanding of posthumous release. Moloney recorded conversations with her at St Patrick’s Hospital and, a few days later, at a rented flat, then placed this material in the archive’s Treasure Room. These recordings were not technically part of the Belfast Project, but the broad wording of the subpoenas and BC’s decision to surrender them brought them into the same chain of disclosure.

The coded system also shaped Bell’s prosecution. The prosecution associated an interviewee identified as Z with a role in McConville’s murder, but BC had lost the document connecting Z’s code to Bell. Bell’s lawyer argued that the tapes were unreliable and inadmissible, and that the prosecution could not prove the speaker was his client. A voice analyst later testified that Z was likely Bell, while a police detective interpreted the interview as acknowledging a critical role in the killing. The archive thus supplied material that could be examined and disputed, but missing identity documentation, contested interpretation, and legal standards determined what could be established. Prosecutors concluded that allegations against Adams in the tapes were uncorroborated and insufficient for prosecution, while Bell was prosecuted on the basis of his own recorded account. Historical implication and criminal proof did not yield the same result.

Aftermath and the archive’s fate

Moloney and McIntyre appealed, lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and obtained a stay while seeking review by the Supreme Court of the United States. In spring 2013, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Two detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland then travelled to Logan Airport and BC to retrieve the material authorized by the judge, including Moloney’s Price interviews. The archive had been intended to keep testimony safe; in this instance, depositing material there placed it within reach of the subpoenas. Gerry Adams was arrested the following spring in connection with McConville’s abduction and murder, though the existence of the recordings did not itself settle the allegations against him.

The archive’s future as a research collection also narrowed. The book’s author reports receiving the complete, unredacted transcript of Hughes’s interview from Moloney, but no other participant or project figure shared the remaining oral histories. The tapes had become criminal evidence and a political weapon, and the author judged that they were unlikely ever to become available to researchers. BC later offered participants the return of their interviews, seeking to shed responsibility for material it had handled carelessly. Ricky O’Rawe accepted his recordings and transcripts, carried them to his study, and burned them in the fireplace beside photographs of former comrades, including one of Hughes. The act made the archive’s central paradox tangible: testimony preserved to outlast its speakers could instead be surrendered, withheld, contested, returned, or destroyed. Its record is therefore not only a collection of memories, but also a history of the fragile promises and competing powers that determine whether those memories can be heard.