Belfast Project
Boston college oral history on the Troubles
The Belfast Project, also known as the Boston Tapes or the Boston College Tapes, was an oral history initiative based at Boston College in Massachusetts, United States, aimed at documenting personal experiences of paramilitaries during the Troubles, the armed conflict in Northern Ireland from the 1960s – 1990s. Launched in 2000 and concluding interviews in 2006, the project collected confidential testimonies from Republican and Loyalist participants of the conflict, with releases intended only after their deaths to serve as historical resources.
Directed by journalist Ed Moloney, it involved around 50 interviews, but faced intense scrutiny after subpoenas led to the release of select tapes for criminal investigations. In 2014, Boston College terminated the project and offered to return materials to living participants upon request. The project highlighted ethical dilemmas in oral history, including confidentiality limits and researcher biases.
Establishment
Ed Moloney, Robert Keating O'Neill, and Anthony McIntyre played central roles in establishing the oral history initiative. In 2000, Moloney introduced O'Neill to former IRA member Anthony McIntyre, proposing the project to collect confidential interviews with paramilitaries. O'Neill, alongside Boston College historian Thomas Hachey, supported, oversaw, and secured funding for the effort, which ran from 2001 to 2006.
Interviews
The project conducted around 50 interviews. Former IRA member turned academic Anthony McIntyre conducted interviews with Irish republican paramilitary members including Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price, Ivor Bell, and Richard O'Rawe.
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This entry incorporates text from “Belfast Project” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.