Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney

Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney’s relationship was forged around a problem of silence: how to record the history of the Troubles from people who feared prosecution, retaliation, and the stigma attached to informing. Their collaboration produced the Belfast Project, an archive built on promises of secrecy that later became the center of a bitter legal fight. The same trust that made the interviews possible gave the pair a shared obligation to protect them; the limits of that obligation became clear when the recordings were subpoenaed.

A project shaped by mistrust

Moloney proposed that Boston College document the conflict through oral histories by people who had fought on its front lines. The obstacle was not simply getting former combatants to speak candidly. The IRA remained illegal, and admitting membership could expose someone to prosecution. Within the republican movement, the prohibition on discussing paramilitary activity carried a still more immediate danger: someone who broke its code of silence could be branded a tout, a term for an informer, and killed. Moloney’s proposed answer was to interview participants while their memories were fresh and keep their testimony sealed until after their deaths, protecting them from both the authorities and their former comrades.

A conventional team of graduate students was unlikely to persuade hardened militants to disclose their histories. Moloney therefore proposed an unusual alternative: former paramilitaries might be more willing to speak to someone who had once been one of them. McIntyre, known as Mackers, brought that access. He had joined the Provisional IRA as a teenager and served seventeen years in prison for murdering a loyalist paramilitary. He later pursued education in prison and, after the peace process left him disillusioned, became a critic of Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin. That position mattered to the project’s design: people no longer close to Adams could be approached, while inviting the leadership itself risked alerting it to the archive and prompting efforts to stop participation.

Recording and safeguarding testimony

McIntyre sought interviewees over several years while trying to keep the undertaking hidden. He communicated with Moloney through encrypted email, minimized the paper trail, and carried a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack as he travelled around Belfast and beyond. Interviews were not brief statements: he met participants on multiple occasions, spending ten hours or more with each person across several sittings. A trusted typist prepared transcripts, and McIntyre sent the recordings and transcripts to Boston College, where librarian Bob O’Neill stored them in the Treasure Room of the Burns Library.

The archive’s identification system was designed to separate a participant’s account from their name. Materials sent to Boston College used alphabetical code names; the link between a code and an actual identity appeared only in separate signed contracts. McIntyre and Moloney’s work thus depended on several layers of confidence: interviewees had to trust McIntyre as a former combatant and interviewer, and both men had to trust Boston College to safeguard the recordings and honor the confidentiality assurances. One of McIntyre’s interviewees was Brendan Hughes, a former IRA man he had first met in prison in 1974. Their closeness gave those conversations an intimate quality, while Hughes’s disillusionment with the peace process and break with Adams placed his testimony within the project’s effort to reach former republicans outside the leadership’s orbit.

The subpoena and a rupture in confidence

The partnership faced a crisis when authorities sought access to the archive. McIntyre emphasized that confidentiality and protection had been the reason for placing the recordings at a United States university. In a conference call with the project’s other architects, he feared that Boston College might ultimately hand over the material and leave the interviewers and former paramilitaries exposed. Moloney shared his alarm. To forestall a quiet transfer, he contacted the press, helping bring the dispute into public view through a front-page New York Times story and an interview with the Boston Globe. He argued that the tapes might have to be destroyed rather than surrendered. Boston College project leaders objected that he had gone to reporters without consulting them and considered the threat excessive.

The dispute sharpened when the college handed over Hughes’s interviews after his death, reasoning that some of their contents had already appeared in Moloney’s book, Voices from the Grave. The surrendered transcripts and recordings were unredacted, unlike the carefully edited book. Moloney was furious and warned that the authorities could use the material to seek further interviews. He proposed that Boston College send the whole archive to McIntyre in Ireland, where McIntyre was prepared to risk imprisonment rather than surrender the recordings. The proposal reflected their shared view that participants’ safety and the confidentiality promise carried a moral obligation, though transferring the archive might itself have amounted to obstruction of justice. The university refused to move it and agreed to contest the subpoena concerning Dolours Price’s interview.

Litigation and the boundaries of the promise

Moloney and McIntyre’s case rested on the assurances made to interviewees, academic freedom, the possible danger to participants, and the risks to the peace process. Yet the contractual safeguard had a serious weakness: the participants’ agreements did not say that confidentiality might be overridden by a court order. Although Moloney had suggested that the proposed language be reviewed by Boston College’s legal staff, the contracts were apparently never reviewed by a university lawyer. The project had promised protection without securing a legal guarantee capable of ensuring it.

When a second subpoena sought material relating to Jean McConville’s abduction and death, the two men continued their resistance in court and through political advocacy. They hired their own lawyers after Boston College chose not to appeal an adverse ruling. John Kerry urged the secretary of state to work with British authorities, warning that the subpoenas could jeopardize the peace process, and the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief opposing them. McIntyre also refused to help a judge identify which coded interviews concerned McConville, explaining that doing so would cross the boundary between academic research and police investigation. Moloney and McIntyre lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. A stay temporarily prevented the university from releasing the interviews while they sought further review, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2013. After the judge examined the republican transcripts, five participants’ recordings were authorized for release.

Their alliance was strong in defense of participants, but neither man’s assurances could control what the institutions and courts would do. The controversy also exposed doubts about the project’s academic standing: McIntyre and the loyalist interviewer, Wilson McArthur, were close to some interviewees and had not established themselves as experienced oral historians. The case therefore left their collaboration caught between two claims that had initially seemed compatible: that former combatants’ testimony should be preserved, and that the people who entrusted it to the archive could be protected from its use as evidence. The subpoenas made the conflict between those aims impossible to conceal.