John J. Burns Library is a major repository of Irish political and cultural history in the United States, but in the account of the Belfast Project it becomes more than a storehouse: its Treasure Room is where contested memories were secured, concealed, and ultimately made vulnerable to legal seizure. The library’s collection and careful safeguards gave the oral-history archive a physical home; the arrival of detectives from Belfast showed how little those safeguards could guarantee when testimony became evidence in a murder investigation.

Setting and collection

John J. Burns Library occupies a grand neo-Gothic building on the leafy campus of Boston College. Its stone spires and stained glass give it the appearance of a church, a visual impression that sits alongside the university’s founding purpose: the Jesuits established Boston College in 1863 to educate the children of poor immigrants who had fled the potato famine in Ireland. Over the following century and a half, the college maintained close ties to Ireland, and the library grew into a major repository for Irish history and culture in the United States.

The library held 250,000 volumes and approximately sixteen million manuscripts, forming the most comprehensive collection of Irish political and cultural artefacts in the country. Its reputation for acquiring valuable historical objects also carried risks. One librarian was imprisoned after trying to sell a 1480 tract by Saint Thomas Aquinas to Sotheby’s; a later director called the FBI when an Irish grave robber attempted to sell him looted tombstones marked with ancient crosses, rings, and inscriptions. These episodes establish the institution as a place where the preservation and acquisition of historical evidence were matters of unusual consequence.

The Treasure Room

The rarest and most valuable materials were kept in the Treasure Room, a secure enclosure governed by layers of physical and environmental protection. The room was precisely climate-controlled and equipped with a modern fire-suppression system. Surveillance cameras monitored it; entry required a code entered on an electronic pad and a special key, which had to be signed out. Only a select handful of people were permitted to sign for that key.

This carefully controlled room became the repository for the Belfast Project’s confidential interviews. Beginning in 2001, Anthony McIntyre conducted interviews with former republicans who were no longer close to Gerry Adams. To avoid discovery, he communicated with Ed Moloney through encrypted email and tried to minimize the paper trail. He carried a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack, met interviewees repeatedly, and spent ten hours or more with each person across several sittings. Afterward, a trusted typist prepared transcripts, and McIntyre sent both transcripts and recordings to Boston College for storage in the Treasure Room.

The archive’s procedures made the library’s security central to its operation. The materials sent to Boston College identified participants by letters of the alphabet rather than by name; only a separate set of signed contracts linked those code names to the individuals. Bob O’Neill, head of John J. Burns Library, was regarded as an expert in archival security and had written on the subject. His professional emphasis on careful custody gave the archive an institutional setting suited to its sensitive contents, but physical security and legal confidentiality were not the same protection.

A contested archive

The project’s architects had not settled clearly who would eventually be allowed to consult the interviews. The stated audience was future Boston College students, yet the history department had not known the project existed until Moloney’s book, Voices from the Grave, brought it to public attention. Apart from O’Neill and Tom Hachey, almost nobody at Boston College knew about the archive. When a professor arranged for a doctoral student to consult interviews for research, Moloney objected and proposed that applicants be vetted by him. Hachey, in turn, argued that the college had never agreed to exclude the wider scholarly and journalistic community indefinitely.

Confidentiality was also less legally secure than participants had been led to believe. Wilson McArthur, who interviewed loyalists, recalled that participants had been assured of an ironclad guarantee: their testimony would not be released, or even acknowledged, until after their deaths. Yet the contracts had not been reviewed by Boston College’s lawyers, and they did not explain that a court order might override the assurances. The Treasure Room could restrict physical access; it could not make those promises binding against a subpoena.

The archive became entangled in competing claims about memory and accountability. Moloney and McIntyre considered Brendan Hughes’s oral history credible and continued to believe Jean McConville had been an informant, while others questioned the evidence. One dispute concerned whether British forces had used a small handheld radio in Belfast in 1972. Moloney and a researcher with British Army experience found old files and a photograph of a soldier holding such a radio in Divis Flats. The disagreement illustrates how historical inquiry depended not only on testimony but on what documents and objects could be found, and how their meaning remained contested.

From guarded deposit to police evidence

In 2013, a Belfast tabloid article attributed detailed allegations about disappearances to Dolours Price and suggested that its reporter had heard her recorded confession. Moloney reacted with alarm, but knew that the account could not have come from her Belfast Project interviews: Price had not mentioned Jean McConville in those recordings, because McIntyre had warned her against doing so. Moloney and McIntyre suspected that the newspaper had heard a different recording, made during an interview with another journalist. The existence of two recordings complicated the public story, while the Treasure Room remained the archive’s apparent point of protection.

That protection failed to prevent legal transfer. After Brendan Hughes died, Boston College turned over his unredacted interviews to investigators, reasoning in part that his death and the publication of material from his oral history reduced the basis for withholding them. Moloney feared that the authorities would use the material to seek further interviews. Boston College refused his proposal to send the archive out of the country, but agreed to fight the subpoena for Price’s interview. Its court filing argued that disclosure would breach participant agreements, damage academic freedom and the peace process, and endanger people associated with the project. The United States government countered that the promises could not conceal evidence of murder or other crimes from legal process.

In July 2013, two detectives from the Serious Crime Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland flew from Belfast to Boston College to collect files stored in the Treasure Room. They took MiniDiscs and transcripts with care because the recordings had become evidence in a criminal proceeding concerning a murder. Three years earlier, Moloney had deposited separate interviews with Price in what he considered the safest place available. Those interviews were not technically part of the Belfast Project, but broad subpoenas led Boston College to surrender them with the other material, despite Moloney’s plea that they be excluded. The secure room had preserved the recordings; it had not kept them beyond the reach of investigators.

Memory and historical significance

John J. Burns Library’s role in the story draws together preservation and exposure. The institution had been suggested as a place to document the Troubles for students a generation later, at a moment of hope after the Good Friday Agreement. But the peace settlement did not resolve how the conflict should be remembered, and the archive’s secrecy reflected that uncertainty. In a society where political leaders’ denials and party discipline shaped what could be said, an interview stored under a code name could be both a historical record and a personal risk.

The library’s Gothic appearance and guarded inner room sharpen this tension without resolving it. A repository intended to protect rare objects and manuscripts held testimony that its custodians could not guarantee would remain protected. The detectives’ journey from Belfast to the Treasure Room turned a scholarly collection into a point of contact between private memory and criminal investigation. In that reversal, the library embodies the book’s larger concern: a conflict may end on the battlefield, while its second struggle, over evidence, silence, and the meaning of the past, continues in the places where its records are kept.