The Belfast Project tapes

The Belfast Project tapes are the recordings and transcripts of confidential interviews with former combatants, created to preserve personal accounts of The Troubles while participants were still alive to give them. Their significance lies in the double life of the archive: it was designed as a protected record for posterity, yet later became a potential source of evidence in criminal investigations, exposing the gap between a promise of secrecy and the power of a court order.

Purpose and design

The idea developed from a broader proposal to document The Troubles before its participants began to die. Paul Bew raised that general aim; Ed Moloney proposed the more specific form of an oral history in which people who had been on the front lines could speak about their experiences. That design addressed a problem deeper than finding willing interviewees. The IRA remained illegal, and admitting membership could bring prosecution. Within paramilitary communities, speaking about operations could also earn the label of informer, or tout, and put a speaker at risk of being killed. Suspicion of outsiders made conventional academic interviewing especially difficult.

Moloney’s proposed answer was to have former combatants interview other former combatants, rather than send graduate students to seek testimony from people who distrusted them. The archive was to be sealed until participants had died. That delay was meant to make candid testimony possible while memories were fresh, and to protect interviewees from prosecution or punishment by former associates during their lifetimes. The promise of posthumous release was therefore not incidental to the project: it was the condition intended to make the recordings possible.

Recording and assembling the archive

Anthony McIntyre, himself a former IRA member and prisoner, sought out republicans who had become estranged from Gerry Adams or were otherwise no longer close to him. He took care to keep the project from attracting attention: he used encrypted email to communicate with Moloney, tried to limit the paper trail, and carried a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack. Interviews usually unfolded over several sittings, with ten hours or more spent with each participant. A trusted typist prepared transcripts after the interviews were complete.

The recordings and transcripts were sent to Boston College and stored by librarian Bob O’Neill in the Treasure Room of the John J. Burns Library, described as the library’s most secure area. To add another layer of protection, materials sent to Boston College identified interviewees by letters rather than names. The link between a code and a real identity was kept separately in signed contracts, which also set out the confidentiality assurance. That division was intended to keep the interview content and the identities of its speakers apart; it would later make the archive’s incomplete records consequential.

One of the coded interviewees was Brendan Hughes, whom McIntyre had known since meeting him in prison in 1974. Their long acquaintance gave their conversations an intimate, easy-going quality. Hughes, like McIntyre, had become disillusioned with the peace process and broken with Adams and Sinn Féin. His account was filed under the code C. The personal relationships that helped interviewers gain access thus shaped the archive at its point of creation: these were not detached questionnaires, but conversations conducted between people with shared histories and political divisions.

Confidentiality and custody

The project’s safeguards depended not only on secure storage and coded identities, but also on what Boston College had legally promised. In early 2001, while preparing participant contracts, Moloney sent proposed language to O’Neill and suggested that the wording might be referred to the university’s lawyers. O’Neill replied that he was working on the contracts and would consult them. The agreements were not, however, reviewed by a Boston College lawyer. They also did not state that a confidentiality assurance might fail to protect the archive from a court order.

This omission mattered when the authorities sought material from the archive. Before the end of May 2011, Boston College turned over the Hughes recordings and transcripts on the grounds that Hughes was dead and much of his oral history had already appeared in Moloney’s book, Voices from the Grave. The released material was unredacted, unlike the carefully edited published account, which had concealed certain identities for legal and security reasons. The distinction between a prepared book and the underlying recordings was decisive: the latter gave authorities material that the editorial process had withheld. Moloney feared that access to Hughes’s interviews would lead to demands for the identities of other participants as well.

Subpoenas and the Price recordings

After Moloney and McIntyre lost their case in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, a stay temporarily prevented the university from turning over interviews while they appealed. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case in 2013. To determine which interviews fell within a subpoena seeking material connected to the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, Judge William Young read the republican interview transcripts himself over several days during Christmas. He found that six participants had mentioned McConville, although one had referred to her only in passing, and authorized release of recordings associated with five participants.

The resulting dispute over Dolours Price’s interviews turned on an important distinction within the archive. McIntyre had recorded about fifteen hours of conversation with Price, and she did not mention McConville in those interviews. Moloney and McIntyre had publicly maintained that McConville’s disappearance had never come up in Price’s Belfast Project conversations; in that narrow sense, their claim was accurate. But there was another set of recordings: interviews Moloney conducted himself after the Belfast Project’s interview programme had ended. In 2010, he proposed that Price recount her past in greater detail under the same arrangement of withholding the account until after her death. She agreed, and Moloney recorded conversations with her at St Patrick’s Hospital and, a few days later, in a rented flat. In these separate recordings, Price discussed McConville’s disappearance in detail. The archive’s contents could not be understood simply by treating every recording as part of the same interview series or by assuming that one interviewer’s conversations captured everything a participant had said elsewhere.

Evidence, identity, and memory

The tapes also became important in the prosecution of Ivor Bell. In court, an interviewee identified by the code Z was said to have acknowledged a role in McConville’s murder. Bell’s lawyer argued both that the recordings were unreliable and inadmissible as criminal evidence and that Bell had not been in Belfast when McConville was abducted. The defence also denied that Bell was Z. Boston College had lost some of the forms that linked letter codes to real identities, including the form for Z, leaving prosecutors without that document to establish the identification. Moloney and McIntyre knew who Z was but refused to assist the court with the identification.

A forensic voice analyst later testified that Z was likely Bell. The recording nevertheless posed a separate question from identity: what, precisely, did the interview establish about Bell’s actions? His lawyer said the speaker denied involvement, while a Police Service of Northern Ireland detective interpreted the interview as acknowledging a critical role in the crime. The prosecution of Bell illustrates why the archive’s evidentiary value could not be reduced to the fact that a recording existed. Identification, interpretation, admissibility, and corroboration remained distinct issues. In the case against Gerry Adams, prosecutors concluded that allegations in the tapes were uncorroborated and would not provide a successful basis for prosecution. An account that implicated its speaker could therefore carry different legal consequences from one that implicated another person.

The book that draws on this history describes itself as narrative nonfiction based on four years of research, seven trips to Northern Ireland, and interviews with more than one hundred people. It says that recollections were corroborated wherever possible and that discrepancies were handled by using the most plausible account in the main narrative while discussing alternatives in the notes. That stated method underscores the tapes’ importance without making them self-interpreting: they preserve testimony, but testimony has a speaker, an interviewer, a recording history, and a context of fear and expectation. The epigraph’s distinction between war on the battlefield and war in memory frames the archive’s central tension. These recordings were made to carry the conflict into the historical record; their later exposure made the struggle over who could tell that history part of the record itself.