United States Department of Justice

The United States Department of Justice became a central institutional actor in the fight over the Boston College Belfast Project when it transmitted a British request for recordings of former paramilitaries and set US legal process in motion to obtain them. The case tested whether an archive gathered under assurances of secrecy could be protected from court-ordered disclosure, and whether testimony important to understanding the conflict could also become evidence in a murder investigation.

The request and its context

The Belfast Project was conceived by Ed Moloney as an oral history in which former republican and loyalist combatants could describe their experiences. The project’s promise of delayed disclosure was intended to address a particular danger: paramilitary participants risked prosecution by the authorities, while violating the internal code of silence could expose them to retaliation from former comrades. The interviews were to remain sealed until participants had died.

That undertaking filled a gap left by the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement created no general truth-and-reconciliation process or exchange of testimony for legal immunity. Troubles-related murders remained open criminal cases, and former combatants or soldiers could still face prosecution. A limited amnesty applied to people who voluntarily supplied information to help recover the bodies of the disappeared, but it did not amount to a broad protection for oral histories.

One spring morning in 2011, Moloney received word that Boston College had been served with a subpoena. Acting under a mutual legal assistance treaty with the United Kingdom, the United States Department of Justice transmitted an official request from the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The demand sought the original recordings of interviews with Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price in connection with an alleged violation of UK law, namely murder. The recordings were therefore being sought not simply as historical material, but in the course of an investigation into the disappearance and killing of Jean McConville.

Confidentiality promises and competing claims

The dispute quickly turned on what the interviewers had promised and whether those promises could withstand a legal demand. Loyalist interviewer Wilson McArthur said he had assured participants that their involvement and testimony would remain confidential until after their deaths. Yet when Moloney drafted the participant contracts in 2001, he asked Boston College director Bob O’Neill whether the proposed language should be referred to the university’s lawyers. O’Neill said he would have it reviewed; apparently, no review took place. The signed agreements contained no qualification warning that a court order might override confidentiality, and no Boston College lawyer had examined them.

Boston College argued in court that disclosure would breach its agreements, threaten academic freedom and endanger people associated with the project. Its lawyers also stressed the danger created by the republican code of silence. The US government countered that the project’s organizers had made promises they could not legally guarantee, and that the archive could not be shielded from a court order by claiming academic privilege. It also challenged the claim that disclosure posed a serious security risk, pointing to the project’s public profile and the fact that McIntyre had not been assassinated after his interviewing role became known.

The government further suggested that Price’s interview had already been unsealed and shared with a reporter. Boston College’s lawyers disputed that account, arguing that the reporter had implied access to the tapes without actually claiming to have heard them. The disagreement illustrated how descriptions of the archive, as well as the recordings themselves, became contested material in the litigation.

Disclosure and the limits of the archive

Before the end of May, Boston College handed over Hughes’s interviews, reasoning that he had died and that much of his oral history had already appeared in Moloney’s book, Voices from the Grave. The material supplied to the Police Service of Northern Ireland was unredacted, unlike the edited book, which had concealed certain identities for legal and security reasons. Moloney objected that the authorities now possessed information on which they could act.

A second subpoena, issued in August, demanded material related to the abduction and death of Jean McConville. A federal judge later ordered Boston College to provide recordings and transcripts for judicial review. The college did not appeal that ruling, prompting Moloney and McIntyre to hire their own lawyers and challenge it. They lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; a stay temporarily prevented disclosure while they sought further review, but the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case in 2013.

The process also exposed weaknesses in the archive’s handling of identity and scope. Interviews had been logged under alphabetic code names, with the names corresponding to those codes kept on separate forms. The judge read the republican transcripts himself to determine which interviews mentioned McConville, and authorized release of recordings connected to five participants. One was Price. Moloney and McIntyre had maintained that the roughly fifteen hours Price recorded with McIntyre did not mention McConville. That was true of those interviews, but a separate set of recordings existed: Moloney had later interviewed Price himself about McConville in detail under the same promise of posthumous secrecy.

The distinction mattered beyond the immediate subpoena dispute. In Ivor Bell’s later prosecution, his lawyer argued that the Boston tapes were inadmissible and unreliable as criminal evidence. The interviewee identified in court only as Z was alleged to be Bell, but Boston College had lost the form that would have connected the code name to his identity. Bell’s defence disputed that he was Z and challenged the evidentiary value of the interview. The archive could thus contain testimony of historical significance without automatically resolving who spoke, what the speaker had admitted, or whether a court could rely on it.

Institutional and historical significance

The United States Department of Justice’s role placed the Belfast Project between two systems with different aims: an oral-history undertaking premised on delayed disclosure and a criminal investigation seeking material about an unresolved killing. The litigation showed that ethical assurances, research practice and legal enforceability were not the same thing. The participants had been promised secrecy; the contracts did not clearly state its limits; and the court process ultimately required disclosure of some records.

The case also unfolded in a wider absence of an agreed mechanism for dealing with the past. With no comprehensive truth process or general immunity-for-testimony arrangement, old crimes remained subject to investigation while historical accounts could be compelled for use by authorities. The resulting struggle did not settle the historical truth of the allegations surrounding McConville. It made the conditions under which that truth might be recorded, protected, tested and used part of the conflict’s unresolved legacy.