Bob O'Neill

Bob O'Neill was head of the John J. Burns Library at Boston College and a central institutional figure in the Belfast Project, the effort to preserve first-person accounts of the Troubles. He helped turn an idea for documenting the conflict into a clandestine oral-history archive, and later became responsible for safeguarding its recordings and transcripts. The archive’s eventual exposure placed his commitment to confidentiality against the demands of courts and investigators, revealing how fragile the project’s assurances had been.

Identity and the Project’s Origins

In spring 2000, while visiting Boston College, historian Paul Bew proposed documenting the three-decade conflict in Northern Ireland for future researchers. Bew raised the possibility of collecting testimony from people who had participated in the Troubles with O'Neill, then head of the John J. Burns Library. O'Neill liked the idea. He and Bew considered a record intended for graduate students a generation later, rather than a collection built to serve immediate political arguments.

The initial proposal was broad. Ed Moloney, whom Bew suggested as project director, made it more specific: an oral history in which combatants could speak candidly about their experiences. The obstacle was not simply persuading people to participate. The paramilitary world was governed by a code of silence, and acknowledging membership in the IRA could expose someone to prosecution. Informers, known as touts, could be killed. Moloney proposed that interviews be sealed until participants had died, so that former combatants could talk while their memories were still fresh without expecting their accounts to become public during their lifetimes. O'Neill supported this arrangement as the project took shape.

In summer 2000, O'Neill and Moloney met Anthony McIntyre at Deanes, a seafood restaurant in central Belfast. McIntyre, a former IRA member who had served seventeen years in prison, was both an academic and an insider to the republican movement. Moloney’s solution to participants’ distrust of university researchers was to have a former paramilitary conduct interviews. The dinner joined the archive’s institutional sponsor to the people and methods that would make its testimony possible.

Custodian of the Archive

The project depended on discretion at every stage. McIntyre used encrypted email to communicate with Moloney, recorded lengthy interviews on a digital MiniDisc, and had completed interviews transcribed by a trusted typist. He then sent recordings and transcripts to Boston College, where O'Neill stored them in the Treasure Room, the most secure part of the Burns Library. O'Neill had published a book on archival security and treated the protection of entrusted materials as a professional responsibility.

The archive’s system separated testimony from the identities of its contributors. When materials arrived, participants were identified by letters rather than names. Their real identities were connected to those codes in separate signed contracts that promised confidentiality. This distinction mattered both as a security measure and later in court: the interview files did not themselves name the speakers, while O'Neill and McIntyre possessed different kinds of knowledge about who had taken part. The archive’s physical safeguards could protect its contents from casual access, but its confidentiality also relied on promises made to interviewees and on the university’s willingness and legal ability to keep those promises.

O'Neill’s role extended beyond storage. In 2010, he and Tom Hachey wrote a preface to Voices from the Grave, which Moloney assembled from the Boston College transcript of Brendan Hughes and the transcript of loyalist politician and former UVF member David Ervine, both recently dead. They presented the book as the first in a planned series drawn from the oral-history archive. Its publication made the archive’s existence public and brought Hughes’s allegations against Gerry Adams into wider circulation. The book therefore gave the project an afterlife in print, while also increasing the attention directed toward the still-sealed interviews.

The Confidentiality Crisis

When the Police Service of Northern Ireland sought access to the recordings, O'Neill took part in an emergency conference call with Hachey, Moloney, McIntyre, and Wilson McArthur, who had conducted the loyalist interviews. Hachey relayed that Boston College president William Leahy had assured him that the university would not allow its interviewers or interviews to be compromised. O'Neill and Hachey sounded reassuring on the call, but the questions they asked about what participants had actually been promised gave Moloney reason to doubt that the institution would withstand the pressure.

McArthur said he had described the confidentiality guarantee to his interviewees as ironclad, and had told them that Boston College’s legal counsel had reviewed the arrangement. The project’s contracts, however, had not been reviewed by a university lawyer. In early 2001 Moloney sent O'Neill proposed contract language and suggested that O'Neill might refer it to the university’s legal staff. O'Neill replied that he was working on the wording and would run it by the lawyers; the account indicates that this review never happened. The signed agreements did not warn participants that a court order could override the confidentiality promise. The gap between the assurance given to contributors and the legal protection actually secured would become central to the crisis.

Before the end of May, Boston College turned over Hughes’s interviews, reasoning that he had died and that much of his oral history had already appeared in Voices from the Grave. The materials supplied to authorities were unredacted, unlike the carefully edited book. Moloney protested that the authorities now had information on which they could act and urged the university to protect the rest of the archive. O'Neill and Hachey did not speak again with their project partners after the conference call. The episode made the difference between publishing a deceased participant’s edited account and handing over the underlying recordings and transcripts consequential: the archive contained material that had not been made public in the book.

Courts, Records, and the Limits of Custody

A later subpoena sought any material related to the abduction and death of Jean McConville. When Judge William Young tried to determine which coded interviews might fall within its scope, he asked McIntyre for help. McIntyre refused, arguing that identifying relevant participants would cross the boundary between academic research and police investigation. The judge then asked O'Neill, who said that he had not read the interviews and also declined to assist. Over several days around Christmas, Young read the republican transcripts himself. He found six participants who mentioned McConville, one only in passing, and authorized the release of recordings associated with five.

The litigation exposed an awkward asymmetry in O'Neill’s position. As librarian and custodian, he had been responsible for securing the project’s materials; yet, when asked to identify whose interviews might relate to the case, he said he could not do so because he had not read them. The court’s review consequently replaced the archive’s internal code system with judicial examination of the contents. The resulting order concerned material that McIntyre and Moloney had maintained was not present in the interviews conducted by McIntyre with Dolours Price; a separate set of recordings in which Price discussed McConville had been made by Moloney.

In July 2013, two detectives travelled to Boston College to retrieve material authorized for collection. Moloney asked O'Neill not to include his interviews with Price among the materials handed over. Those recordings had not technically been part of the Belfast Project, but Moloney had deposited them in its archive in an effort to keep them safe. The subpoenas were broad enough to encompass them, and Boston College surrendered them along with the other material. The following spring, the Police Service of Northern Ireland arrested Adams in connection with McConville’s abduction and murder, four decades earlier. The sequence linked the archive’s custody decisions to a live criminal investigation, though the evidence does not establish that O'Neill personally chose each item the university produced.

Significance

O'Neill’s part in the Belfast Project was neither that of an interviewer nor that of a participant recounting paramilitary experience. His influence lay in the institutional choices that made the interviews possible: endorsing the proposal, helping provide a secure repository, and participating in a system that separated names from testimony. His expertise in archival security gave the collection a credible custodian, but security of storage could not by itself guarantee secrecy against legal process.

The archive’s fate sharpened the tension between oral history as a record for future readers and testimony gathered under a promise of protection. O'Neill’s assurance through the project’s leadership, the contracts that lacked a court-order qualification, the release of Hughes’s unredacted material, and his refusal to identify participants to the judge all belong to that tension. His role therefore carries both sides of the project’s legacy: Boston College preserved accounts that might otherwise have remained inaccessible, yet the university’s custody did not prevent some of those accounts from reaching authorities before the promised time.