Paul Bew

Paul Bew was the academic whose proposal to document the Troubles helped set the Belfast Project in motion. A professor of Irish history normally based at Queen’s University Belfast, he was visiting Boston College in 2000 when he suggested gathering testimony from people who had participated in the conflict. Ed Moloney developed that broad idea into a secret oral-history project, and Bew backed both its design and the appointment of former advisee Anthony McIntyre as an interviewer.

Academic position and the initial proposal

In the spring of 2000, Bew was spending a visiting-scholar stint at Boston College. His work was rooted in Irish history, but he also had experience close to contemporary politics: he had served as an adviser to David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and a central figure in the Good Friday negotiations, who was then Northern Ireland’s first minister. Bew therefore occupied a position between academic study and the political process that had recently brought the conflict into a new phase.

Boston College’s administration was looking for a way to mark the end of the three-decade conflict. Bew raised the possibility with Bob O’Neill, head of the John J. Burns Library, that the college could gather testimony from people who had taken part. The purpose was prospective: to create a historical record that graduate students a generation later could consult. As later recollections clarified, the initial idea of documenting the conflict was Bew’s; the specific proposal to compile an oral history came from Moloney.

From documentation to oral history

Moloney’s proposal addressed a problem that made the project both valuable and hazardous. The details of paramilitary activity remained difficult to discuss: the IRA was illegal, and admitting membership could expose a former participant to prosecution. The danger was not only legal. Within militant communities, a person who broke the code of silence could be branded a tout, a term associated with lethal consequences. Moloney reasoned that a promise to keep testimony sealed until the participant had died might make candid accounts possible while memories were still fresh.

Bew responded enthusiastically to this arrangement. He spoke of preserving the recordings as “laying down the tapes,” likening their storage to setting aside bottles of claret. The image captured the project’s intended delay: interviews would be made in the present but held for a future audience. The archive was not conceived as a public reckoning in the immediate aftermath of conflict; its appeal depended on participants believing that their accounts would remain inaccessible during their lifetimes.

Supporting the project’s people and structure

The proposed method raised a practical question: why would former gunmen speak openly to academic researchers? Moloney’s answer was to enlist former paramilitaries as interviewers. At a dinner in Belfast with O’Neill, he met McIntyre, an ex-IRA prisoner who had later studied at Queen’s under Bew and completed a doctorate on the republican movement. McIntyre could speak both the language of scholarship and that of the street, making him a credible intermediary for interviewees who might distrust outsiders.

Bew endorsed bringing in his former advisee. He also welcomed the prospect that the project might provide McIntyre with paid work. The support was personal as well as intellectual: Bew knew McIntyre through his academic training and saw a way for that expertise to be used in an undertaking that was otherwise difficult to staff. Moloney recruited Wilson McArthur, who had connections in loyalist circles, for interviews on that side. The intended archive would include former republican and loyalist paramilitaries; an original suggestion to include police testimony was eventually abandoned.

The Belfast Project’s founding conditions

In 2001, Boston College received a grant of $200,000 from an Irish American businessman willing to support the initiative. The project’s organizers agreed that the undertaking had to remain secret because of the sensitivity of its subject matter. Secrecy was therefore not incidental to the project’s launch: it formed part of the conditions under which interviews could be sought and recorded.

The eventual archive was built around assurances that testimony would remain confidential until after participants’ deaths. Later events exposed the vulnerability of those assurances. The participant contracts did not specify that confidentiality might fail in response to a court order, and no Boston College lawyer reviewed them. The evidence does not place Bew in the drafting or legal review of those contracts; his documented contribution belongs to the project’s beginnings. He had helped move the college from a general wish to commemorate the conflict toward a plan for preserving testimony that its participants might otherwise have kept silent.