Police Service of Northern Ireland

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is the post-agreement police service that investigates Troubles-related crimes in a society where the peace settlement left much of the past legally unresolved. The book’s account makes the institution consequential in two connected ways: it sought access to confidential Boston College Belfast Project interviews as part of a murder investigation, and it later pursued historic cases within a criminal-justice system that had no shared mechanism for truth recovery, amnesty, or reconciliation.

Institutional Setting and the Unresolved Past

The Good Friday Agreement directed attention toward political arrangements and the future rather than creating a truth-and-reconciliation process for the violence of the preceding decades. It provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners held at the time and capped at two years any future sentences for Troubles-related crimes. It did not establish a general amnesty in exchange for testimony or a process to account for past killings. The book contrasts this absence with South Africa’s post-apartheid process, which offered legal immunity in exchange for truth, while noting that the South African model was itself criticized as incomplete and political.

The agreement’s limited exception concerned people who voluntarily provided information to help locate the bodies of the disappeared: legislation passed in 1999 offered a limited amnesty for that purpose. Otherwise, unsolved Troubles murders remained open criminal cases, potentially exposing former paramilitaries and former soldiers to prosecution. Because the conflict ended in a political stalemate rather than an accepted victory by one side, there was no common framework for deciding how its history should be investigated or commemorated. In that setting, the PSNI inherited both ordinary policing responsibilities and the burden of cases whose political meanings remained contested.

The rebranding of the Royal Ulster Constabulary as the PSNI was one of the institutional changes associated with the agreement. The book sets that change beside Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2012 acknowledgment of “frankly shocking levels of state collusion.” It also describes the killings associated with the Nutting Squad and Brian Nelson as crimes facilitated or condoned by the state, while emphasizing that the Troubles were never formally declared a war and those murders would not be prosecuted as war crimes. The PSNI’s historical investigations therefore operated amid persistent arguments about state conduct, equal treatment, and the legitimacy of renewed criminal inquiries.

The Boston College Interviews and the Subpoenas

The PSNI’s most direct institutional intervention in the book’s central archival dispute began when it requested interviews held by Boston College. One spring morning, Ed Moloney received word that the college had been served with a subpoena. The United States Department of Justice had transmitted an official request under a mutual legal assistance treaty with the United Kingdom; the stated purpose was to assist authorities investigating an alleged violation of UK law, namely murder. The first demand specified the original recordings of interviews with Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price.

The dispute touched the Belfast Project’s central promise. Interviewers had told participants that their testimony would remain confidential and would not even be acknowledged until after their deaths. In the case of loyalist interviews, Wilson McArthur described the assurance as ironclad and said he had invoked Boston College’s legal counsel when reassuring wary participants. But the contracts contained no qualification explaining that a court order could override confidentiality, and no Boston College lawyer had reviewed the agreements. The archive’s promise and its legal vulnerability were therefore in direct conflict before the PSNI request arrived.

Boston College turned over the Brendan Hughes interviews before the end of May, on the grounds that Hughes had died and much of his oral history had already appeared in Voices from the Grave. The material sent to the authorities was unredacted, unlike the edited book, which had concealed some identities for legal and security reasons. In August, a second subpoena demanded recordings relating to the abduction and death of Jean McConville. A federal judge later ordered the university to submit tapes and transcripts for review. When the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in 2013, the judge identified six republican interviewees who mentioned McConville and authorized the release of recordings associated with five.

The archive contained a complication that shaped the case. Anthony McIntyre’s roughly fifteen hours of recorded interviews with Dolours Price did not mention McConville; Moloney and McIntyre had repeatedly emphasized that absence. But Moloney had separately recorded Price in 2010, after the Belfast Project interviews had ended. In conversations at St Patrick’s Hospital and in a rented flat, Price discussed McConville in detail. That second set of recordings was not the interview set whose silence Moloney had described. The distinction between interviewer, recording, and archive mattered both to the public account and to the legal demand.

Investigations and the McConville Case

The PSNI used the Boston College interviews in questioning people about McConville’s abduction and murder. Several people were arrested and questioned; some had lived in the Divis area when she was taken and might, if involved, have played only a minor role in removing her from her flat. They were released. The one person charged was Ivor Bell, a veteran republican accused of aiding and abetting the murder and of IRA membership. The account records that the murder charge was later changed from aiding and abetting to soliciting.

The recordings and other accounts did not settle who had ordered the killing. Brendan Hughes and Price maintained that Gerry Adams had given the order. Bell’s lawyer argued that the interviewee identified by the code name Z was not Bell, that the tapes were unreliable and inadmissible, and that Bell had an alibi placing him outside Belfast at the relevant time. Boston College had lost the form connecting Z’s code name to the interviewee’s real identity, leaving prosecutors without that document to establish the identification. A voice analyst later testified that Z was likely Bell; a PSNI detective who had heard the interview said Z acknowledged a critical role in the murder. The competing claims illustrate the distinction between what an oral history might suggest and what prosecutors could establish in court.

Adams, who had been a legislator in the Republic of Ireland since 2011, arranged to present himself at a PSNI station in Antrim after the police contacted him through his lawyers. On 30 April, just after eight in the evening, he entered the station; his belt, watch, and tie were removed before officers questioned him. After the PSNI forwarded his file, prosecutors concluded that the evidence against him consisted of uncorroborated allegations and would not support a successful prosecution. The book contrasts that outcome with Bell’s prosecution: an interview could be used against a participant accused of involvement, while accusations in oral histories against another person did not provide a prosecutable case.

Legacy Policing and the Limits of Accountability

The PSNI’s work on historical crimes was not confined to the McConville investigation. Its legacy unit was devoted exclusively to Troubles-related cases and faced a backlog of nearly a thousand. Inquests, police-ombudsman investigations, and special government inquiries proceeded alongside criminal investigations, while Belfast newspapers regularly reported new cold cases being reopened. With limited resources and budgets under pressure, the police also had to continue ordinary present-day policing. The book describes the temporal dislocation of the work: officers could be living in 2018 outside the office while investigating events from 1973 or 1989 inside it.

The possibility of impartial investigation was itself contested. A prosecution lawyer speaking for Bell asked whether British soldiers who shot unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday would face equal treatment. The question reflected the wider absence of a settled process for dealing with the past: each investigation and prosecution proceeded case by case, leaving different communities suspicious of selective justice. The PSNI’s legacy work thus stood between two demands that the book does not resolve—investigating individual crimes under ordinary law, and addressing a shared history in which state forces and paramilitary organizations were implicated in different ways.

Moloney also alleged that PSNI detectives visited Jim McConville in prison in 2011 and suggested he make a legal complaint stating that the Boston College interviews might shed light on his mother’s death. Moloney argued that encouraging a possible civil claim would enable the police to subpoena the archive and amounted to a bribe. This is presented as Moloney’s contention, not as an established finding. It shows how the family’s search for answers, the police investigation, and the archive’s confidentiality became entangled, with each raising different questions about whose interests the recordings served.

The PSNI is therefore portrayed neither simply as the instrument of historical reckoning nor as a neutral solution to it. It pursued murder investigations through subpoenas and interviews, but the evidence available to police and prosecutors did not produce a uniform path to accountability. The institution’s legacy unit could reopen cases, yet it worked without a comprehensive settlement on truth, immunity, or equal treatment. The resulting tension is central to the book’s account of a peace whose political institutions had moved forward while criminal cases—and disputes over what could be known and proved—remained open.