Promises of Confidentiality in Academic Research? Potential Lessons from The Belfast Project
Today is St. Patrick’s Day, celebrated with greater fervor in many U.S. communities than it is in Ireland. Indeed, as I learned during my 2010 sabbatical in Northern Ireland, while Belfast is home to a variety of dramatic “historical” parades and holidays, events on St. Patrick’s Day are low key and mostly for children.
In the March 16 issue of The New Yorker magazine, writer (and Yale-educated lawyer) Patrick Radden Keefe digs into the history of Northern Ireland, looking at the late stages of the Troubles. He examines possible roles played by Gerry Adams as an acknowledged leader of political party Sinn Fein versus his long-denied authority for certain violent actions of the IRA.
Keefe provides a comprehensive analysis of the events before and after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, offering details that are devastating if true about how violence was often at its most problematic when perpetrated within the ranks of extreme republican and loyalist factions. Central to the history is the lingering question of who was responsible for the December 1972 abduction and execution of Jean McConville, the widowed mother of 10 children, suspected of informing against the IRA.
In the article, Gerry Adams comes across as determined to be both charismatic and enigmatic, as hero and anti-hero, as deeply devoted to a “United Ireland,” while also oddly enamored with trivial self-promotion. I came away from the article thinking it was a good reminder of how dangerous it can be — in any country — to believe absolutely in any single leader.
The article also presents ethical questions associated with efforts to document the Troubles through oral histories recorded under the auspices of Boston College:
“As [Irish Times writer] Moloney was preparing the book [A Secret History of the IRA] for publication, he was approached by administrators at Boston College about creating an oral-history project that would gather accounts by paramilitaries from both sides of the Troubles. The idea excited him. Many of the combatants were still alive, and their testimony could provide an unparalleled resource for future historians. . . . Given the sensitivities, Moloney pointed out, each interview would have to be conducted in secret, and remain secret until the participant died. . . . This clandestine undertaking became known, to the people who were aware of it, as the Belfast Project.”
However, rumors circulated about the Boston College archive, and by 2011 official attempts to “consult” the oral histories for purposes of criminal investigations lead to cross-Atlantic subpoenas and court cases. As the article reports, in “September, 2013 Boston College turned eleven interviews over to authorities in Belfast.”
Academic researchers are not news reporters. News reporter privileges are narrow and — at times — controversial. What authority does an academic research project have to “promise” confidentiality for any period of time?
The release of the oral histories had consequences, including consequences for Gerry Adams, who was “arrested for questioning in connection with the death of McConville” and “interrogated for four days” based in major part on the information contained in the Belfast Project recordings. When he was eventually released without facing specific charges, he reportedly characterized the Belfast Project as “an entirely bogus, shoddy, and self-serving effort.”
The conclusion of the New Yorker article, Where the Bodies are Buried, focuses on important moral and legal questions in the continuing, if now thankfully less violent, arguments about governance and independence in Northern Ireland. The coverage also suggests that greater attention must be paid to moral and legal questions that can arise from promises of confidentiality in academic research.