Burns Library

Burns Library was the secure repository for the Belfast Project’s recordings and transcripts, placing a university archive at the centre of a dispute over secrecy, testimony, and the evidence of the Northern Ireland conflict. Its role was chiefly custodial, but the archive’s later exposure made the library’s protected storage—and the limits of that protection—part of the project’s history.

Repository and Custody

In the spring of 2001, Anthony McIntyre began interviewing republicans for the Belfast Project. He recorded interviews on a digital MiniDisc, met many subjects several times, and spent ten hours or more with each person across multiple sittings. After an interview was complete, a trusted typist prepared a transcript. McIntyre then sent both recordings and transcripts to Boston College, where Bob O’Neill stored them in the most secure part of Burns Library, the Treasure Room.

O’Neill was described as an expert in archival security. The archive’s location and handling reflected the project’s need for secrecy: McIntyre used encrypted email to communicate with Ed Moloney, tried to leave as little paper trail as possible, and conducted interviews without alerting the Sinn Féin leadership. The materials were not ordinary public-history holdings. Their custody was bound up with an assurance that participants’ accounts would remain sealed until after their deaths.

Secrecy and the Archive’s Contents

The Treasure Room held material gathered from a range of republican participants, including Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price. Price’s case shows why the archive’s contents required precise distinctions. She spent about fifteen hours in recorded conversations with McIntyre and did not mention Jean McConville in those interviews. But a separate set of recordings, made by Moloney rather than McIntyre, contained Price’s detailed account of McConville’s disappearance. Moloney recorded her at St Patrick’s Hospital and later filmed another interview in a rented flat; he proposed safeguarding these interviews on the same terms as the Belfast Project material.

That distinction became consequential when a judge reviewed the archive. Over several days during one Christmas, Judge Young read the transcripts of the republican interviews himself. He found that six participants mentioned McConville, although one did so only in passing, and authorised the release of recordings associated with five participants. Price’s Belfast Project interviews were among the material at issue, but the separate Moloney recordings meant that the archive contained an account of McConville’s disappearance even though she had not discussed it with McIntyre.

From Protected Record to Legal Evidence

The archive’s confidentiality was challenged when police sought material connected to the McConville investigation. Boston College supplied Brendan Hughes interviews and material concerning McConville to the police; the Belfast Project’s records consequently became entangled in subpoena litigation. The project’s promise of posthumous confidentiality had to contend with legal demands for evidence, and materials preserved in the library could no longer be treated simply as interviews held in trust.

The proceedings also exposed how a recording’s significance could depend on who conducted it and what it contained. In the case of Ivor Bell, an interview recorded as part of the project was examined in court, and a voice analyst testified that the speaker identified as Z was likely Bell. A police detective interpreted the recording as acknowledging a critical role in aiding and abetting McConville’s murder, while Bell’s lawyer argued that the speaker explicitly denied involvement. The archive had become not only a record of past accounts but a contested source whose words were tested for identity and meaning.

Institutional and Historical Significance

Burns Library’s place in the story rests on a tension between preservation and disclosure. The secure storage that made it possible to collect candid accounts also concentrated them in a repository where legal process could seek access. Boston College’s later provision of interviews and McConville-related material to police shows that custody did not guarantee permanent secrecy; the archive’s contents could acquire consequences beyond the conditions under which they were recorded.

The episode gives the library a significance beyond storage. The Belfast Project was created in a society where former combatants could face danger for speaking to outsiders, and where political narratives about the conflict remained closely guarded. Once the recordings became subject to legal scrutiny, the archive stood between private testimony and public accountability. Burns Library thus became a material hinge in the book’s larger question of how the conflict would be remembered: not merely through what witnesses said, but through where their words were kept, who could reach them, and how they could be used.