By Michael Caprio
Special to the Reporter

The U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts, acting on behalf of British officials, has served Boston College with a subpoena as part of an effort by law enforcement authorities in Northern Ireland to obtain files from the university’s oral history collection on the Troubles that plagued the North going back 40 years and more. The college is deciding how to respond to the call for the testimonies, which were obtained under a promise of confidentiality-until-death.

News reports say the subpoena maneuver is part of an investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) into the disappearance during the 1970s of nine people who were believed to be informants for the British government. The move to obtain BC’s files might be an attempt to establish a link between the disappearances and Gerry Adams, the leader of the republican Sinn Fein party, according to the New York Times, which noted that the subpoenaed records contain interviews with two former IRA members who have accused Adams of running a secret criminal squad within the Provisional IRA.

But the interviews of the two individuals – Brendan Hughes and Delours Price – were obtained by BC under the promise that they would not be released until their deaths. Hughes died in 2008 and his testimony came to prominent light with the publication of a book by Ed Maloney entitled “Voices from the Grave.” In the book, Hughes accuses Adams of ordering the murder of at least one alleged British spy. Price, however, is still alive and the fate of her testimony is uncertain for now.

For their part, BC officials said that they are exploring all legal options. “We have been in direct contact with the U.S. attorney’s office,” university spokesman Jack Dunn said. “When you let them know the dilemma, it becomes easier to work with them,” he added. As to calls by some for the university to destroy the documents in the interest of academic integrity, such a move is not an option, said Dunn; BC’s legal team is working to come up with a solution in line with the subpoena action’s timetable.

Since the serving of the papers on BC, the interview records – which were once available to the public at BC’s John J. Burns Library – have been kept under lock and key in a holding room that houses valuable university records and artifacts, said one university librarian.

The action by the PSNI has caused a stir in a city well known for its close ties to Ireland and, sometimes, to the IRA. Kevin Cullen, a columnist for the Boston Globe who previously served as the newspaper’s bureau chief in Dublin, called the subpoena “hypocritical” in a recent column, saying “The British government has never disclosed its own official files, which implicate many of its own security forces in any number of killings in Ireland over the last century, never mind the last 40 years.”

The interviews with Hughes and Price are but two pieces of a trove of information about Northern Ireland that the university has amassed, mostly through academic projects. BC’s Center for Irish Programs also has a collection of reports by an international commission that oversaw the disarming of paramilitary groups in Ireland. Those documents are sealed, too.

A number of individuals connected to Boston College have played significant roles in the peace process that has brought stability to the long-troubled six counties in the North. Kathleen O’Toole, a 1976 graduate who once led the Boston Police Department, served on the Patten Commission that oversaw the reform of the Royal Ulster Contabulary, and political science professor Marc Landy was an advisor to the Northern Irish Assembly as it worked toward a power-sharing coalition government in the wake of the Good Friday accords in 1998. The university itself received funding from the U.S. State Department as it was setting up its Irish Institute in 1997, an effort to bring professionals from government and the private sector together to discuss peace and community cooperation.

The common thread in all these programs, says BC spokesman Dunn, has been the promotion of peace on an island whose history is inextricably linked to Boston College and the American nation.