Boston College recordings and transcripts

Boston College recordings and transcripts were the recorded testimony and written interview records gathered for a secret oral-history project about the Troubles. Created under a promise that participants’ accounts would remain sealed until after their deaths, they were meant to preserve memories that fear and an internal code of silence had kept from public view. Their later use in a murder investigation turned that archival promise into a legal and political fault line: the materials could reveal what participants had said, but neither confidentiality nor the recordings themselves could guarantee what a court would be able to prove.

Creation and Safekeeping

Ed Moloney proposed that Boston College collect oral histories from former combatants while their memories were still fresh, then withhold their testimony until they could no longer be prosecuted or chastised by former associates. The need for such an arrangement arose from the risks of speaking openly: admitting membership in an illegal organisation could invite prosecution, while a participant labelled an informer could face lethal consequences. Moloney therefore proposed an unconventional method: former paramilitaries might be more willing to speak to another former paramilitary than to academic researchers. Boston College supported the idea.

Anthony McIntyre carried out interviews with republican participants, while Wilson McArthur interviewed loyalists. McIntyre used encrypted email to communicate with Moloney, kept the project’s paper trail to a minimum, and carried a digital MiniDisc recorder to interviews in Belfast and elsewhere. He met participants repeatedly, often spending ten hours or more with each person across several sittings. A trusted typist prepared transcripts; McIntyre then sent both recordings and transcripts to Boston College, where librarian Bob O’Neill stored them in the Treasure Room at the John J. Burns Library.

The storage arrangements made the archive’s physical security unusually conspicuous. The Treasure Room was climate-controlled, protected by a fire-suppression system, monitored by cameras, and accessible through an electronic code and a specially signed-out key. In 2013, detectives from the Serious Crime Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland crossed from Belfast to collect the files in person. The material included MiniDiscs and transcripts; by then, it was officially evidence in a murder investigation. The journey from a locked archival room to police custody gave the recordings a new function, far removed from the sealed time capsule their creators had envisaged.

Confidentiality and the Archive’s Fragile Design

The system separated interview content from participants’ identities. Recordings and transcripts were labelled with alphabetic code names rather than actual names. A separate set of signed contracts linked each code to its participant and assured them that their testimony would remain confidential. Those identity forms were considered so sensitive that they were hand-delivered to Bob O’Neill rather than sent electronically.

The confidentiality assurances, however, were stronger than the legal protections behind them. In early 2001, Moloney sent proposed contract language to O’Neill and suggested that university lawyers review it. O’Neill said he would consult them, but the contracts were ultimately not reviewed by Boston College’s lawyers. They also contained no qualification explaining that a court order might override the promise of secrecy. The difference between what interviewers told participants and what the contracts could actually secure became central once investigators sought the archive.

The records also had gaps that were consequential in court. Boston College later lost some of the forms connecting code names with real participants, including the form for Z, the code used for an interview attributed to Ivor Bell. The recordings and transcripts preserved the interview itself, but the missing form weakened the documentary link between the coded voice and Bell. Thus the archive’s separation of identity from testimony served confidentiality, yet also left a vulnerable point in its chain of identification.

Subpoenas and the Price Interviews

After the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in 2013, a judge examined republican interview transcripts to determine which fell within a subpoena seeking material related to the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Anthony McIntyre declined to identify which interviewees had discussed her, saying that doing so would cross the boundary between academic research and police investigation. Bob O’Neill also declined to assist, saying he had not read the interviews. The judge reviewed the transcripts himself over several days around Christmas, found that six participants mentioned McConville, and authorised the release of recordings associated with five of them.

The case exposed a distinction between two sets of recordings involving Dolours Price. McIntyre had recorded about fifteen hours of conversations with her, and she did not mention Jean McConville in those interviews. Ed Moloney later interviewed Price separately, after visiting her in Dublin and at St Patrick’s Hospital in 2010. She agreed to the same posthumous-secrecy arrangement; Moloney recorded one conversation and filmed another. In that separate material, Price discussed McConville’s disappearance in detail. The claim that Price’s Belfast Project interviews contained no such discussion was therefore technically accurate, but it did not describe all the recordings held in the archive.

The distinction mattered because the archive was not a single, uniform body of testimony. Who conducted an interview, which recording was being considered, and whether it addressed the disappearance all affected how the material figured in the legal proceedings. The recordings associated with Brendan Hughes were turned over after his death, partly on the grounds that material from his oral history had already appeared in Ed Moloney’s book. The transcripts and recordings supplied to the authorities were unredacted, unlike the carefully edited published account, which had shielded some identities for legal and security reasons.

Evidence, Identification, and Historical Limits

In Ivor Bell’s prosecution, his lawyer argued that the Boston tapes were inadmissible: an academic oral-history archive, he contended, was subjective, inaccurate, and did not meet the standards required of criminal evidence. Bell also maintained that he had not been in Belfast during the relevant period and had an alibi. His central defence was that he was not the person identified by the code name Z. Because Boston College had lost the form linking Z to an actual name, prosecutors could not produce that document to establish the identification. A forensic phonetics analyst later testified that Z was likely Bell, but the question of what the interview said remained contested: Bell’s lawyer argued that Z explicitly denied involvement in McConville’s murder, while a Police Service of Northern Ireland detective interpreted the recording as acknowledging a critical role in procuring it.

The proceedings also demonstrated that an interview’s implications depended on whom it implicated. Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price both maintained that Gerry Adams had ordered McConville’s murder. Prosecutors concluded that the allegations against Adams were uncorroborated and insufficient for prosecution. The book’s account draws a sharp distinction between testimony that might implicate its speaker and testimony that accuses another person: the former could be used in prosecution, while the latter did not, in this instance, provide a successful basis for prosecuting Adams. The recordings could preserve allegations and expose contradictions without resolving the historical question of responsibility in court.

The archive’s afterlife therefore complicates both oral history and criminal evidence. Its interview conditions made candid testimony possible, but confidentiality promises left participants exposed when legal demands arrived; code names protected identities, but missing forms obstructed identification; recordings preserved speech, but competing interpretations of that speech did not automatically become proof. The files passed from guarded storage into official evidence, yet their significance remained larger than their admissibility: they made hidden accounts available for scrutiny while showing how much can remain unsettled when memory, secrecy, and the law meet.