Boston College Belfast oral-history project

The Boston College Belfast oral-history project was a clandestine effort to record former republican and loyalist paramilitaries speaking about the Troubles in their own words. Conceived as an archive for future generations, it addressed a central post-conflict dilemma: how to preserve testimony about violence when speaking could invite prosecution or retaliation. Its promise of secrecy helped make the interviews possible, but the eventual handover of Brendan Hughes’s unredacted recordings showed how fragile that promise was when the archive came under legal pressure.

Purpose and political setting

Ed Moloney proposed the project to Paul Bew as a specific form of oral history: combatants who had been close to the conflict would describe their experiences while their memories were still fresh, with the interviews held back from public release until after their deaths. The idea took shape in a society where the peace settlement had prioritised political arrangements and the future, but had created no truth-and-reconciliation mechanism for reckoning with the previous three decades. Unlike the South African process, which offered legal immunity in exchange for testimony, the Belfast archive promised confidentiality without an equivalent formal route to immunity.

That distinction mattered because the Irish Republican Army remained illegal, and even acknowledging membership could expose a former participant to prosecution. Fear of being branded a tout, or informer, also made disclosure dangerous within former paramilitary circles. The project’s organisers hoped that delayed release would protect interviewees from both state action and punishment by their former peers. Boston College’s location across the Atlantic seemed to offer distance from police in Britain and Ireland; Moloney also believed that the institution’s standing and the First Amendment would make efforts to obtain the material unlikely to succeed.

The project arose amid a wider struggle over who could speak for the past. Gerry Adams continued to deny ever having been in the Irish Republican Army, while Martin McGuinness acknowledged his membership in 2001 in the context of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, where he would receive immunity from prosecution. The continued silence around paramilitary histories, and the circumstances under which some admissions could be made, strengthened the case for an archive outside the ordinary political arena. The project’s ambition was not simply to collect reminiscences: it sought to preserve accounts that the peace process had left without a public institutional home.

Formation and interviewers

The project’s practical design emerged from a meeting in the summer of 2000. Moloney and Boston College librarian Bob O’Neill met Anthony McIntyre at Deanes, a seafood restaurant in central Belfast. McIntyre, known as Mackers, had joined the Provisional IRA as a teenager and served seventeen years in prison for the murder of a loyalist paramilitary. After his release in 1992, he studied at Queen’s University Belfast, completed a doctorate on the republican movement, and became fluent in both academic and republican worlds. Moloney, who had first met him at a republican funeral in 1993, considered that combination essential: former combatants might speak to someone with McIntyre’s background where they would not speak to an academic stranger.

In 2001, Boston College received a $200,000 grant from an Irish American businessman to support the undertaking. The plan was to interview former participants on both republican and loyalist sides. Moloney had initially hoped to include police officers, but that element was abandoned. For the loyalist interviews, he recruited Wilson McArthur, an East Belfast man with connections in loyalist circles and a degree from Queen’s. The three men agreed that the undertaking itself had to remain secret because of the subject matter and the risks attached to disclosure.

McIntyre’s own political position shaped the project’s reach. Disillusioned with the Good Friday Agreement, he believed Sinn Féin had accepted too little by agreeing to a settlement that left British rule in Ireland in place. The party leadership, in turn, dismissed critics as dissidents or opponents of the peace process and sought to maintain a coherent account of the conflict. As a result, McIntyre concentrated on republicans who were no longer close to Adams. He was reluctant even to approach the leadership, fearing that knowledge of the archive could bring pressure on potential participants and shut the project down.

Interview practice and the archive

McIntyre began interviewing in the spring of 2001. He communicated with Moloney using encrypted email and tried to leave as little paper trail as possible. Carrying a digital MiniDisc recorder in his backpack, he met interviewees in Belfast and elsewhere. He returned to each person over several sittings, often recording ten hours or more. Once interviews were complete, a trusted typist transcribed them; McIntyre then sent both recordings and transcripts to Boston College, where O’Neill stored them in the Treasure Room, the most secure part of the Burns Library.

The archive separated interview content from participant identity. Materials sent to Boston College identified each interviewee with an alphabetical code rather than a name. The link between a code and a person appeared only in separate signed contracts that promised confidentiality. The arrangement was intended to limit the exposure of people describing crimes in which they had participated, while allowing the interviews to be preserved for later use. In practice, however, the promise depended on more than physical security and coded files: it also depended on the legal wording of the contracts and on whether the university could resist a court demand.

One of the most consequential interviews was with Brendan Hughes, whom McIntyre had first met in prison in 1974. The two men were close, and their established relationship gave the conversations an intimate quality. Hughes, like McIntyre, had become deeply disillusioned with the peace process and had broken with Adams and Sinn Féin. In the project materials, his identity was concealed under the code name C. The personal trust that enabled such testimony was also a defining feature of the archive: these were not detached interviews conducted by outsiders with no connection to the lives being described.

Confidentiality under pressure

The project’s confidentiality arrangements proved weaker than participants had been led to believe. When Moloney prepared the contracts in early 2001, he suggested that O’Neill refer the proposed language to Boston College’s lawyers. O’Neill replied that he would consult them, but the agreements apparently were never reviewed by the university’s legal counsel. The contracts did not explain that a confidentiality promise might not protect the archive from a court order. The assurances made to interviewees therefore went beyond what the documents could guarantee.

That gap became critical after the interviews attracted official attention. In a conference call, Tom Hachey, a Boston College Irish-studies professor involved in the project, expressed opposition to using the archive to build a case against Adams. The project’s partners also questioned precisely what interviewers had promised. Wilson McArthur said he had described the guarantee to loyalist interviewees as ironclad and had told wary participants that Boston College’s legal counsel had vetted the arrangement; that assurance was not borne out by the contract history.

Before the end of May, Boston College turned over Hughes’s interviews on the grounds that he had died and that much of his oral history had already appeared in Moloney’s book, Voices from the Grave. The published book had been carefully edited to protect certain identities for legal and security reasons, but the transcripts and recordings handed over were unredacted. Moloney learned that the Police Service of Northern Ireland had obtained the material and warned that it could give the authorities information on which to act. The disclosure made the distinction between a public, edited account and a sealed research archive stark: the latter contained identifying details that the former had deliberately withheld. After the call in which the project’s partners discussed the guarantees, Hachey and O’Neill did not speak to them again.

Memory, discipline, and significance

The project’s significance lies both in the testimony it sought and in the conditions that made testimony dangerous. The peace process brought paramilitary prisoners’ release and political power-sharing, but it did not resolve how the society would record or commemorate the violence. In this setting, an archive could serve as a time capsule for later readers while also carrying material that interviewees feared might be used against them. Its promise of delayed access did not remove that conflict; it institutionalised it.

The political atmosphere also shaped whose accounts were likely to enter the collection. Sinn Féin’s leadership maintained a disciplined narrative of republican armed struggle, which critics such as McIntyre regarded as self-serving and restrictive. The project’s focus on people distant from Adams reflected that divide, rather than representing an uncomplicated cross-section of former participants. Its interviews must therefore be understood not only as recollections of past events, but as testimony produced within ongoing disagreements about the peace settlement, political authority, and the right to define the history of the conflict.

The book recounting the project invokes the idea that wars are fought again in memory. The Belfast archive gave that second struggle a material form: recordings, transcripts, contracts, codes, and the guarded room in which the files were stored. Those safeguards made candid testimony possible, yet the release of Hughes’s unredacted material revealed their limits. The project’s history thus stands as both an attempt to preserve what silence concealed and a warning that promises of confidentiality can fail when the archive becomes politically and legally consequential.