Boston College Belfast Project subpoena battle

The Boston College Belfast Project subpoena battle was a legal and political struggle over recordings made under promises of confidentiality, and over whether an oral-history archive could be compelled to supply material for a murder investigation. A request from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, transmitted through the United States Department of Justice, led to court orders for interviews with Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price. Boston College’s eventual compliance put interviewees’ assurances at risk and revealed how little legal protection the project’s contracts actually offered.

The first subpoena and the promise of secrecy

One bright, chilly morning in the Bronx, Ed Moloney learned that Boston College had received a subpoena seeking the original recordings of all interviews with Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price. The request came from the Police Service of Northern Ireland through the United States Department of Justice under a mutual legal assistance treaty with the United Kingdom. It concerned an alleged murder, though the subpoena initially specified the two interviewees rather than a particular victim. The news alarmed the project’s architects, who had believed that the archive’s recordings would remain sealed.

Anthony McIntyre, who had interviewed Price, and Wilson McArthur, who had conducted the loyalist interviews, joined Moloney, Tom Hachey, and Bob O’Neill in an emergency conference call. Hachey reported that Boston College president William Leahy had promised not to allow the interviewers or interviews to be compromised. That reassurance collided with the participants’ understanding of the project: McArthur said he had told interviewees that their testimony would neither be released nor their participation acknowledged until after their deaths. He had described the protection as ironclad and understood that Boston College’s legal counsel had reviewed it.

That assurance had no such legal foundation. When Moloney drafted participant contracts in 2001, he suggested that O’Neill refer the proposed wording to the university’s lawyers. O’Neill said he would do so, but no lawyer reviewed the agreements. They contained no qualification warning that a court order could override confidentiality. The central vulnerability was therefore built into the project before any subpoena arrived: participants had been given a categorical promise that the signed contracts could not guarantee.

Disclosure, resistance, and competing claims

Before the end of May, Boston College turned over the Hughes interviews, reasoning that Hughes was dead and that much of his oral history had already appeared in Moloney’s book, Voices from the Grave. The comparison concealed an important difference. The published book had been edited to protect identities for legal and security reasons; the recordings and transcripts delivered to the authorities were unredacted. Moloney feared the material could supply leads for further demands and urged the university to move the whole archive to Ireland, where Anthony McIntyre was prepared to defend it. McIntyre regarded protecting participants as a moral obligation, even if doing so required civil disobedience. Hachey refused to transfer the archive out of the country.

Boston College then fought the demand for Price’s interview in federal court. Its lawyers argued that disclosure would violate promises made to participants, damage academic freedom and the peace process in Northern Ireland, and endanger people associated with the project. The university emphasized the IRA’s code of silence and the risks participants believed they faced by describing their paramilitary histories. The United States government answered that the project was not journalism and that no academic privilege shielded its interviews from a court order. It also argued that the interviewers had promised to conceal evidence of serious crimes. In disputing the university’s security arguments, the government pointed to the public discussion of the project and to the fact that Moloney had published a book about it.

A second subpoena arrived in August, this time seeking any recordings relating to the abduction and death of Jean McConville. In December, Judge William Young ordered Boston College to provide recordings and transcripts for judicial review. The university did not appeal that ruling. Moloney and McIntyre, angry at the decision but not surprised by the institution’s retreat, retained their own lawyers. Alongside the court fight, they and Carrie Twomey sought political support. John Kerry wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, warning that the subpoenas could jeopardize the peace process, and the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief opposing them.

Coded identities and the scope of the archive

The interviews were catalogued by alphabetic code rather than by interviewee name, with the identifying forms kept separately. Judge Young asked McIntyre to help identify which participants had discussed McConville. McIntyre refused, saying that doing so would cross the boundary between academic research and police investigation. O’Neill also declined to assist, saying that he had not read the interviews. The judge therefore examined the republican transcripts himself over several days during Christmas. He found six participants who mentioned McConville, one only in passing, and authorized the release of recordings associated with five.

Price’s interview was among those selected, although McIntyre and Moloney had repeatedly maintained that she had never discussed McConville in her Belfast Project conversations. In a narrow technical sense, they were right: Price spent about fifteen hours recorded with McIntyre without mentioning McConville. But the archive also held a different set of interviews, made by Moloney rather than McIntyre, in which Price discussed the disappearance in detail. Those recordings were not technically part of the Belfast Project. Moloney had interviewed Price after her 2010 conversation with the Irish News reporter Allison Morris, intending to preserve her account under the same posthumous-release arrangement. He recorded one conversation at St Patrick’s Hospital and filmed another in a rented flat. After the conversations, he told Price he would protect what she had said and place the material in the Belfast Project archive at Boston College.

That choice brought the separate interviews within the danger surrounding the archive. In July 2013, two detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland travelled to Boston College to collect material authorized for release. Although Moloney asked O’Neill to exclude his interviews with Price, the university treated the subpoenas as broad enough to cover them and handed them over with the other material. An archive intended to keep testimony inaccessible until after a participant’s death had thus become the repository through which investigators obtained it.

Appeals and the limits of oral-history evidence

Moloney and McIntyre appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and lost. A stay prevented Boston College from transferring the interviews while they sought further review, but in spring 2013 the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the case. The legal position was weaker than the project’s promises had suggested: its confidentiality agreements could not prevent court-ordered disclosure, and the courts did not accept academic freedom as a bar to the subpoenas.

The recordings’ release did not make every statement in them usable as proof in a criminal trial. In the later case against Ivor Bell, Bell’s lawyer, Peter Corrigan, argued that the archive was an academic project riddled with inaccuracies and subjective accounts, and that its material did not meet the standards for criminal evidence. He also argued that Bell had not been in Belfast when McConville was abducted. A separate problem arose because Boston College had lost the identifying form linking the interview code Z to Bell, making the documentary identification difficult to establish. The prosecution relied on voice analysis, and an expert concluded that Z was likely Bell; the parties also disputed what the recording actually showed about his role.

The contrast sharpened the larger evidentiary problem. The tapes could expose what an interviewee said about his or her own involvement, yet allegations in the archive about Gerry Adams were judged uncorroborated and insufficient to support a prosecution. In the book’s account, this left a marked asymmetry: an oral history might help prosecute a participant who implicated himself, while failing to establish the criminal case against someone implicated by others. The subpoena battle therefore ended not with a simple resolution of the past, but with testimony exposed to investigators, confidentiality promises discredited, and a continuing dispute over the difference between historical knowledge and evidence a court could prove.