The Belfast Project was an oral history project on the Troubles based at Boston College in Massachusetts, U.S. The project began in 2000, [1] and the last interviews were concluded in 2006. [2] The interviews were intended to be released after the participants' deaths [1] and serve as a resource for future historians.
Ed Moloney was the project's director. [3] Former IRA prisoner turned academic Anthony McIntyre conducted interviews with Irish republican paramilitary members (including Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price, Ivor Bell, and Richard O'Rawe [4] ), while Wilson McArthur, East Belfast resident with strong loyalist ties, conducted interviews with loyalist paramilitary members. [5] The two interviewed more than 40 people. [2] [1] [6]
Interviews with Hughes and David Ervine [7] were used (after their deaths) as the basis for Moloney's 2010 book Voices From The Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland, drawing attention to the archive. [8] [1] [9] Subsequently, interviews dealing with the murder of Jean McConville, one of "Disappeared" of Northern Ireland, were subpoenaed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). [10] Moloney and McIntyre filed a lawsuit seeking to block this request, arguing that it placed project participants at risk. [10] The ACLU filed a supporting brief. [10] However, the PSNI ultimately won the resulting court battle, with a United States appeals court decision stating, "The choice to investigate criminal activity belongs to the government and is not subject to veto by academic researchers." [10] Transcripts of interviews with both Price and Hughes were ultimately given to the PSNI. [11]
In 2014, these interviews were used to charge Ivor Bell with soliciting McConville's murder. [12] Portions of the tapes were played in public for the first time during the court proceedings. [3] Ultimately Bell was acquitted as the court found the tapes to be unreliable and they were not admitted as evidence. [12] These tapes are also thought to have contributed to Gerry Adams's 2014 arrest, in which no charges were ultimately filed. [1]
The project's interviews with the loyalist Winston Churchill Rea were in 2015 also subpoenaed by the PSNI and used to prosecute him for murder and other crimes in 2016. [3] [13] Rea's trial was delayed repeatedly due to his failing health and the coronavirus pandemic. [14] He died in 2023, before the trial could be concluded. [14]
Boston College announced via a student publication in 2014 [15] that it was ending the project, returning tapes to living participants upon request. [16]
Interviewer Anthony McIntyre had himself contributed a recorded interview to the Belfast Project, which were also subsequently subpoenaed by the PSNI in 2018; in April 2024, the courts ultimately ruled in favor of the PSNI accessing the tapes, only five days before the cut-off date of May 1, 2024 set by the Troubles Legacy Act, after which point all active historical investigations and no further inquests into Troubles-era crimes can be launched. [17] [18]