The Bronx enters the account through Riverdale, where Ed Moloney’s home became both the site of an alarming legal notice and a meeting point in the later investigation of the Boston College recordings. Its significance is practical and evidentiary: from this place, the struggle over confidential oral histories moved from a subpoena to the careful circulation of a transcript that contained details about Jean McConville’s disappearance.

Riverdale and the subpoena

One bright, chilly morning, Moloney was at home in Riverdale when a phone call alerted him that Boston College had received a subpoena. Acting on a request from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the United States Department of Justice sought the original recordings of all interviews with Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price, citing an alleged violation of United Kingdom law, namely murder. The demand brought the legal contest over the archive into the ordinary setting of Moloney’s home: the recordings were no longer only a protected collection, but material authorities sought for an investigation.

A meeting place for the archive’s aftermath

The Bronx recurs later as a destination for the book’s narrator, who made periodic trips there over several years to meet Moloney. During this period, Moloney eventually shared an unpublished transcript of one of his two long interviews with Price. The document ran to thirty dense, single-spaced pages, and Moloney had removed the name of a third person said to have been present at McConville’s grave. He explained the redaction by the difference in circumstance: Price and Pat McClure were dead, while the third person was still alive.

Place and the limits of disclosure

These Bronx meetings connect the archive’s legal exposure with the continuing effort to establish what its interviews contained. Price had not mentioned McConville in her recorded Belfast Project conversations with Anthony McIntyre, but she had discussed the disappearance in detail in separate interviews with Moloney. The distinction mattered to the dispute over which recordings could be released, and to the later account built from the transcript. The Bronx therefore serves as a recurring point of access to evidence, while the withheld identity preserves a boundary around what the narrator could establish.