Boston serves two connected roles in the book: it is the home of the archive that brings the Troubles into a criminal investigation, and it is a city where Irish-American attachment to Ireland could coexist with distance from the violence. At Boston College, recordings gathered in secret were stored in a fortified library room until detectives from Belfast came to collect them. Across the city, memories of support for the Irish Republican Army formed part of the narrator’s childhood, though he recalls feeling little personal connection to the conflict. Boston thus joins the story not as a remote repository alone, but as a place where political memory, private testimony, and legal consequence converge.

An Irish-American city

Boston’s ties to Ireland are presented through both its institutions and its everyday political culture. The Jesuits founded Boston College in 1863 to educate the children of poor immigrants who had fled the Irish Great Famine. As the college expanded over the following century and a half, it maintained close connections with Ireland, creating an institutional setting for the collection and preservation of Irish political and cultural material.

The narrator’s own childhood gives the city a less official connection to the conflict. He grew up in Boston during the 1980s in a milieu where Irish Americans could seem more intensely Irish than people in Ireland, and where support for the Irish Republican Army circulated even as it carried out devastating attacks. In a local Irish pub near his childhood home, his father remembered a man soliciting money from patrons for the organization. A black wreath hung above the bar in tribute to its dead. The narrator, despite his Irish name and family heritage, says he experienced the conflict as a distant war rather than as an immediate communal cause. Boston’s identity in the book is therefore marked by a tension between inherited solidarity and personal detachment.

Boston College and the Treasure Room

The book’s most consequential Boston location is the John J. Burns Library at Boston College. Its neo-Gothic stonework and stained glass give the building a churchlike appearance, while its collections make it an exceptional repository: the library holds 250,000 volumes and about sixteen million manuscripts, including what the book describes as the most comprehensive collection of Irish political and cultural artefacts in the United States. Its history also carries a note of risk and vulnerability. A former librarian was imprisoned after trying to sell a rare printed tract, and a later director had to contact the FBI when an Irish grave robber offered looted tombstones for sale.

The rarest materials were kept in the Treasure Room, a space whose elaborate safeguards make the archive’s later exposure especially striking. It was climate-controlled and protected by a modern fire-suppression system; surveillance cameras monitored it, and entry required both an electronic code and a special key that had to be signed out. Only a small number of people could access it. The room’s security was designed to protect valuable objects, but it also became the last enclosure for politically dangerous testimony.

In July 2013, two detectives from the Serious Crime Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland arrived from Belfast and entered the library. They had come to take possession of secret files kept in the Treasure Room for nearly a decade: MiniDiscs containing interviews and the corresponding transcripts. The detectives handled the material with great care because the recordings contained sensitive secrets. They were no longer merely an oral-history collection; they had become evidence in a murder investigation. The journey from a locked archive in Boston to an official criminal proceeding in Northern Ireland gives the city a decisive place in the book’s account of how the past re-enters public life.

The archive becomes a public dispute

Boston also became the scene of a conflict over whether the Belfast Project interviews could remain sealed. When the threat of access became real, Ed Moloney went to the press, and The New York Times published a front-page report on the archive facing a subpoena. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Moloney raised the possibility that Boston College might have to destroy the tapes rather than surrender them. He and Anthony McIntyre feared that the interviewers and former paramilitaries who had disclosed their histories would be left exposed. To them, the dispute implicated free speech and academic freedom; Boston College administrator Tom Hachey rebuked Moloney for approaching reporters without first consulting the university and considered the destruction warning excessive.

The university’s position was complicated by the project’s secrecy. Most staff members had not known about it before Moloney’s book brought it to public attention. Although the project had originally been expected to have university overseers who could monitor its academic standards, that arrangement never materialized. Some faculty members questioned the interviewers’ experience in oral history, their ideological proximity and friendships with subjects, and McIntyre’s history of imprisonment for murder. The archive’s location in Boston had offered security, but its concealment from much of the host institution later weakened the university’s ability to present the project as an established, independently supervised academic undertaking.

Moloney and McIntyre pursued political support alongside their legal appeal. John Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts and a Boston College law graduate, wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguing that the subpoenas could jeopardize the peace process and urging cooperation with British authorities. The Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief opposing the subpoenas. These interventions made Boston’s local connections consequential beyond the university: the college’s relationship to Massachusetts political life and the city’s Irish ties became part of an international dispute over access to testimony.

Memory, distance, and return

The narrator’s decision to write about the conflict began in January 2013, when he read an obituary of Dolours Price in The New York Times. The article connected her life to the continuing battle over Boston College’s secret archive. As a journalist already interested in collective denial, he became curious about why former combatants’ recorded reminiscences remained so threatening. Boston, where he had grown up with signs of Irish-American support but little sense of personal involvement, became the point from which he approached that question.

The book’s opening epigraph, taken from Viet Thanh Nguyen, describes war as something fought first on the battlefield and then again in memory. Boston gives that second struggle a physical setting: a carefully guarded room, recordings converted into evidence, a university challenged over its obligations, and a city whose inherited political sympathies did not mean that every resident felt close to the conflict. The recordings’ passage from Boston to Belfast makes the archive more than a container for recollection. It becomes the point at which private accounts, institutional promises, criminal investigation, and contested public memory meet.