Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States became the final appellate stop in the Belfast Project’s effort to protect confidential interviews from a subpoena. In spring 2013, it refused to hear Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre’s appeal. The refusal did not decide whether the interviewees’ accounts were true or whether they could prove crimes; it left in place a legal process that exposed the archive to disclosure and showed how little the project’s assurances could withstand once a court ordered access.

The Appeal and Its Limits

Moloney and McIntyre had taken their case to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and lost, but obtained a stay barring Boston College from handing over interviews while they pursued an appeal. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear that appeal ended the stay. The record supplied here gives no account of the Court’s reasoning, and its action should not be mistaken for a ruling on the historical claims recorded in the interviews.

The dispute arose from a project designed to collect candid accounts of the Troubles while protecting participants from prosecution and retaliation. Because paramilitary activity remained illegal and disclosure could mark a participant as an informer, the project used coded identities and promised that testimony would remain sealed until after the interviewee’s death. The appeal therefore concerned more than access to a set of tapes: it tested whether an academic archive could honor the confidentiality on which its interviews had depended when authorities sought evidence for a criminal investigation.

The Subpoena and the Coded Archive

The second subpoena requested material relating to the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. To determine which interviews fell within its scope, Judge William Young asked McIntyre to identify participants who had discussed the case. McIntyre declined, maintaining that doing so would cross the boundary between academic research and police investigation. Bob O’Neill also declined to help, saying he had not read the interviews.

The project’s coding system complicated the task. Boston College had logged interviews under alphabetic codes rather than participants’ names; the documents linking codes to identities were held separately. Judge Young therefore read the republican transcripts himself over several days during Christmas. He found that six participants mentioned McConville, although one did so only in passing, and authorized release of recordings associated with five participants. The decision to inspect the contents and identify responsive interviews was the judge’s, not a finding about the reliability or truth of the testimony by the Supreme Court.

Price’s Separate Interview

Among the participants whose recordings were implicated was Dolours Price. Moloney and McIntyre had maintained that Price did not mention McConville in the roughly fifteen hours she recorded with McIntyre. That claim was technically accurate about those interviews, but it did not describe the entire archive: Price had also given a separate, detailed account to Moloney, who interviewed her after the Belfast Project’s scheduled interviews had ended and promised to keep the material sealed until her death.

This distinction exposed a vulnerability in both the project and the public claims made on its behalf. The existence of a separate recording meant that a categorical statement about one set of interviews could obscure relevant material held elsewhere in the archive. The Court’s refusal left the subpoena process moving forward, but the evidence does not show that the Court itself assessed Price’s accounts or determined what they established about McConville’s disappearance.

Confidentiality, Evidence, and Aftermath

The project’s written safeguards had never been as firm as participants were led to believe. When Moloney prepared the contracts in 2001, he suggested that Boston College’s lawyers review the language. O’Neill replied that he would consult them, but no lawyer ultimately reviewed the agreements, and the contracts did not warn that a court order might override the confidentiality promise. That omission mattered once investigators sought the recordings: the assurance of secrecy had been central to recruiting interviewees, yet the signed documents did not protect the archive against compulsory disclosure.

Later proceedings involving Ivor Bell illustrated a different limit of the tapes. Bell’s lawyer argued that the Boston recordings were subjective and unreliable and should not be admitted in a criminal case; the prosecution, by contrast, argued that the speaker identified as Z had played a critical role in the McConville murder. Boston College had lost the form linking Z to a real name, leaving the prosecution without that documentary identification. These arguments belonged to Bell’s case, not to the Supreme Court appeal. Together, however, the disputes reveal the archive’s divided status: it could contain consequential historical testimony while remaining vulnerable to subpoena, contested as evidence, and compromised by gaps in its own custody and identification records.