PSNI subpoenas for the Belfast Project tapes

The PSNI subpoenas for the Belfast Project tapes transformed a confidential oral-history archive into a contested source of evidence in investigations of killings during the Troubles. The resulting litigation tested the promise that interviews would remain sealed until participants had died, and exposed a divide between historical testimony and material that could be securely identified and used in court. Its consequences reached from the release of Brendan Hughes’s interviews to the prosecution of Ivor Bell, without establishing a prosecutable case against Gerry Adams.

A promise of posthumous confidentiality

Ed Moloney proposed the Belfast Project as an oral history in which people who had fought on the front lines could describe their experiences candidly. That was a difficult undertaking in a conflict shaped by an internal prohibition on discussing paramilitary activity: membership itself could lead to prosecution, while a person branded an informer, or tout, risked being killed. Moloney’s answer was to promise that interviews would remain sealed until the participants were dead, protecting them from both state prosecution and reprisals from former comrades while their memories were still fresh enough to record.

The promise became more definite in practice than its legal foundations warranted. When McIntyre and Wilson McArthur interviewed participants, the assurance was that their testimony would not be released or even acknowledged during their lifetimes. McArthur told wary interviewees that Boston College’s legal counsel had vetted the arrangement. Yet when Moloney prepared participant contracts in early 2001, he asked Bob O’Neill to have the proposed language reviewed by the university’s lawyers. O’Neill said he would do so, but the agreements were apparently never reviewed. They contained no qualification warning that confidentiality might not withstand a court order. The archive’s ethical assurance was therefore not backed by the legal protection participants had been led to expect.

Subpoenas and the release of interviews

The first major breach of the project’s intended boundary followed Hughes’s death. Before the end of May, Boston College turned over his interviews on the grounds that he was dead and that much of the oral history had already appeared in Moloney’s book, Voices from the Grave. The published book had been carefully edited to shield identities for legal and security reasons; the recordings and transcripts delivered to the PSNI were unredacted. Moloney objected that the authorities now had information on which they could act and feared that investigators would seek to compel the release of other interviewees’ identities.

Moloney and McIntyre challenged the disclosure but lost at the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. A stay prevented Boston College from handing over further interviews while they appealed. In spring 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case. A second subpoena sought material relating to the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Because Boston College had logged interviews under alphabetic code names, Judge William Young asked McIntyre to identify which participants might have discussed her. McIntyre refused, arguing that helping would cross the boundary between academic research and police investigation. O’Neill also declined to assist, saying that he had not read the interviews.

Young then examined the republican transcripts himself over several days during Christmas. He found that six participants referred to McConville, although one did so only in passing, and authorized the release of recordings associated with five participants. The process made the distinction between a general subpoena and its application to particular interviews consequential: the court’s own review, rather than the project’s interviewers, determined which material fell within the requested scope.

Two sets of recordings, two kinds of evidence

The ordered material included an important complication concerning Dolours Price. Moloney and McIntyre had maintained that she did not mention McConville in the fifteen hours of recorded interviews she conducted with McIntyre. That was technically accurate, but it did not describe all the recordings held in the archive. After Price spoke with Irish News reporter Allison Morris in February 2010, Moloney interviewed her separately, proposing to preserve the account on the same posthumous terms. He recorded a conversation at St Patrick’s Hospital, where Price was being treated for depression and PTSD, and later filmed another interview in a rented flat.

In those separate conversations, Price discussed McConville’s disappearance in detail. Asked by Moloney to establish what had happened after McConville had been taken away, she said the local unit had called them back to Dundalk after McConville had been there for four or five days. A grave had been dug, she said, but the local men did not want to carry out the killing; Price attributed their reluctance to McConville being a woman. The subpoena dispute thus revealed how a statement about one interviewer’s recordings could be literally correct yet leave out another set of recordings in the same archive. It also made the identity of the interviewer and the provenance of each recording central to interpreting what the tapes contained.

The tapes in court and the limits of proof

The archive’s identity system became a separate problem in the prosecution of Bell. A prosecutor alleged that an interviewee identified only as Z had acknowledged a role in McConville’s murder. Bell’s lawyer, Peter Corrigan, argued that the Boston tapes were inadmissible as unreliable and subjective, and said Bell had not been in Belfast at the relevant time. More fundamentally, he argued that the prosecution could not prove Z was Bell. The interviewees’ real names were held on separate forms, but Boston College had lost some of those forms, including the one linking Z to an identity. Moloney and McIntyre knew who Z was but would not assist the court.

A voice analyst testified that Z was likely Bell. The evidence was still contested: Corrigan said the recording explicitly denied involvement in McConville’s murder, while a PSNI detective who had heard it said Z acknowledged a critical role in aiding and procuring the murder. Bell’s case showed that access to a recording did not by itself resolve either who was speaking or what the words established. The legal charges were changed from aiding and abetting to soliciting, but the missing identity form remained a substantial obstacle to proof.

The tapes also did not produce a prosecution of Adams. Hughes and Price had both maintained that Adams ordered the killing, but prosecutors concluded that the material against him consisted of uncorroborated allegations and would not support a successful prosecution. The contrast was stark: an interview could expose its speaker to prosecution while allegations about another person failed to meet the standard needed to proceed. The ruling did not settle the historical question of who ordered McConville’s killing; it established the limits of the case prosecutors believed they could prove.

A continuing dispute over the archive

The subpoena controversy was part of a wider, unresolved struggle over how evidence from the conflict should be gathered, protected, and used. Contemporary reporting also described controversy over requests for recordings of Ulster Volunteer Force members, and in 2016 the police obtained a new subpoena in connection with Winston Rea, who later appeared in court to deny charges. The archive’s exposure was therefore not confined to the republican interviews that had first drawn attention.

The case left competing claims in view at once. The interviews held historical testimony, but their confidentiality had never been legally secured against court orders; code names offered separation from public identification, but lost records weakened that protection; and material that could illuminate a participant’s account might still be disputed, inadmissible, or insufficient to prosecute someone else. The subpoenas did not simply open a sealed archive. They made the archive’s promises, procedures, and evidentiary limits part of the story the interviews had been designed to preserve.