Matthew Barlow

I’m in Salt Lake City, Utah, this week.  This is the second time in two years I’ve been in the area.  Last year on our cross-continental road trip, we passed through on our way from Idaho to Moab, Utah.  We did, however, stop at Antelope Island State Park, just north of Salt Lake City, in Davis County.  Antelope is on the Great Salt Lake.  It was one of my favourite stops on the trip.

As I write this, I am looking out my hotel window, on the 12th floor, at the mountains to the north of downtown Salt Lake.  As I’m sure everyone saw back during the 2002 Winter Olympics, this city is surrounded by some amazing landscape.  But, last summer, standing on Antelope Island, I understood why the Mormons stopped here on their trek west.

The Great Salt Lake is an amazing thing.  It’s the largest salt lake in the western hemisphere, covering some 1,700 square miles.  And it is almost spectral, with its lunar sheen to it.  What amazed me on Antelope Island was watching a series of birds come to land on the lake.  They just slid into place, there was no ripple effect, no wave action.  People call the Great Salt Lake “America’s Dead Sea.” That’s completely wrong, but that’s beside the point.  As I stood on Antelope Island, I looked at the desert landscape around me, I couldn’t see Salt Lake City or any other human settlement (though the park isn’t actually that far from suburbia), just the mountains around me, the desert, and the lake.  And I thought, it kind of looks like the Holy Lands, or at least how I imagine the Holy Lands look.  And, so, no kidding the Mormons stopped here to set up shop.

[Note: This article is written by my wife, Margo Shea, an historian of Northern Ireland, who has written another excellent post on the Belfast Project, which you can find here.  This article is re-published here in an effort to circulate it as widely as possible.  And also because my wife is smarter than me and says what needs to be said about the Belfast Project and Boston College’s ham-fisted response to the current furor better than anyone else can.]

On Tuesday, May 6th, Boston College’s Director of Public Affairs, Jack Dunn, announced that ‘The Belfast Project” oral history initiative would honor all requests from participants to return recordings and transcripts of interviews not currently in use as evidence in the murder investigation of Jean McConville, a Belfast widow abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972.  The college will keep no copies. The information in the interviews will remain known only to the interviewers, a few Boston College employees and William Young, a federal district court judge who read the transcripts to determine which ones should be delivered to Northern Irish authorities under a treaty governing exchanges of information between nations for the purposes of law enforcement.

Boston College’s decision came on the heels of events last week, when the Police Service of Northern Ireland held Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams for questioning about his involvement in the McConville murder.   Evidence came directly from the Belfast Project interviews.  The move by the PSNI invited new scrutiny on an oral history project that has already been the focus of very public controversy, as Beth McMurtrie laid out in her detailed investigative piece published last January in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

News that the recordings and transcripts would be returned was surely met with relief by former republican and loyalist combatants who had agreed to share their stories from the front lines of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, a thirty-year period of political turmoil and civil violence which left 3,700 people dead and approximately 10,000 injured.  Those interviewed had been promised confidentiality in exchange for honesty.  Interviewees revealed information about activities “the dogs on the street” may have known about, but which were rarely discussed on the record.

For Anthony McIntyre, the former republican prisoner and scholar who conducted interviews with fellow ex-combatants, the public announcement was a “symbolic washing of the hands” on the part of Boston College, a way to distance itself from criticism emerging about the project.  Despite having been cast adrift, McIntyre and others closely associated with the project agree that the information on the recordings was not safeguarded well.

While the case has implications for a wide scope of scholarly research, oral historians in particular have been watching the situation closely since 2011, when information from the interviews was first subpoenaed on the basis of material that project co-director, journalist Ed Moloney, included in his book Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland.   Moloney’s use of interviews by former IRA Belfast Brigade commander Brendan Hughes was in accordance with contracts signed by each interviewee forbidding access to interviews until after a participant’s death.  Hughes died in 2008; however, many of the people he discussed on the record remained very much alive.

An increasingly public and vitriolic disagreement has taken place about who is to blame for the exposure of paramilitary secrets, heating up over the past week when Northern Ireland’s republican community reacted to Adams’ arrest.  They slammed the Belfast Project as a vehicle for former republicans disgruntled by the way the peace process unfolded to air dirty laundry, lionize themselves and castigate their enemies within the movement. McIntyre has long been a vocal opponent of both Gerry Adams and post-1998 republicanism, fueling these suspicions.

Photo credit: http://extramuralactivity.com/

The project director, Moloney, and interviewers, McIntyre and Wilson McArthur, who have no professional experience with higher education institutions, say they took Boston College at its word that the material would remain confidential.  They believed the college would be an honest broker and that BC’s Burns Library Special Collections would not only process, catalogue and preserve the collection, but would keep the information it contained confidential.  College spokespeople say that project directors knew from the start that the information would only be protected as “far as American law will allow” and that Bob O’Neill, head of the Burns Library, specifically indicated that it was not clear the commitment to protect the information could withstand a federal court subpoena.

The question remains: What can oral and public historians engaged in collecting and interpreting histories about controversial, divisive and difficult issues and events learn from the Belfast Project and its fallout?

First, if you are serious about collecting and archiving sensitive historical material, put your publishing ambitions aside for the time being.  Ed Moloney’s use of information
provided in Hughes’ interview and his discussion about it it with a Boston Globe reporter in 2010 (Thomas Gagen, “Adams’ Secret, Now His Shame,” The Boston Globe, January  07, 2010) opened up this can of worms.

Next, when addressing controversial histories, it is even more important to remember that interviews are not objective, disinterested, or omniscient sources.  We all know this, but in this case, the media keeps forgetting it.  Obsession with “what is on the tapes” obscures the larger issues around collecting histories in conflict and recent post-conflict zones.

Third, in cases like this one, the institutional review board (IRB) is your friend.  Establishing protocols and taking the necessary precautions to locate control of materials with the interviewees, instead of with the institutions, probably would have made a difference in this case, where interviewees didn’t have final say on edits, redactions, deletions, pseudonyms or anonymity, etc.  They talked, and that was that.  Getting involved with high-stakes history means taking seriously that, well, the stakes are high.

Finally, the critical lesson I take away from this is an affirmation of our priorities as public and oral historians: Trust matters.  So does process.  All the players in the Boston College case got involved for different reasons and wanted different things from the project.  Understanding and identifying partners’ motivations is a necessary prerequisite for endeavors like this.  It in only through this process that those involved can gain a clear understanding of the stakes involved and the breaking point at which commitment to the project and to the relationships that sustain it might falter.  The fragile and failed relationships between project administrators, researchers and interviewees in this case should be a cautionary tale for us all.

I was at a public talk being given by my wife, Margo Shea, at the Beverly Public Library on Monday.  She was talking about the Troubles in Northern Ireland and their aftermath, attempts to deal with the past, to heal, etc.  One of the great contestations of that greatly contested history is what to call it: was it a civil war? Was it a police action?  In the case of the former, she cited family members of young men, members of the IRA, killed by the British Army in the early 1970s.  They, their family members argued, felt they were fighting in a war.  On the other hand, Margo cited the families of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers, who argued this was most certainly NOT a civil war. 

Over 3,700 people died in the Troubles.  Another 50,000 were injured.  It is well nigh impossible to draw a line between civilians and combatants, given the Provisional IRA, much like the IRA it took inspiration from during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) was a guerilla force and faded back into the civilian population after striking.  At least in theory.  The official dating of the Troubles is 1969-97, the years of the Provos campaign against the British.  But the violence began at least a year earlier and the last major bombing, in Omagh, happened in 1998. 

I am less interested in the history than terminology here.  Because as Margo was talking about this dispute as to whether the Troubles was a civil war or police action, I got to thinking about the term “Troubles.”  It is very British in origin.  I also thought about the 1857 “Sepoy Mutiny” in India.  And the 1837 “Rebellion” in Lower Canada.  In all three cases, the descriptive name came from the British, the colonial power the Irish, Indians, and Lower Canadians were rebelling against. 

In grad school, I read Alan Greer’s The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada.  In it, Greer argues that the failed 1837 Rebellion would be better understood as a failed revolution, as the Parti patriote were directly inspired by ideas of liberalism and freedom that drove the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions.  The Patriotes, then, were products of their time. 

Twenty years later, in 1857, the sepoys, or the Indian soldiers in the employ of the East India Company, rebelled.  The rebellion began in Meerut and then spread.  It took 13 months to fully suppress.  The British termed it the “Sepoy Mutiny,” attempting to limit the damage to the military, dismissing it as the work of a few disaffected soldiers.  In India, however, the 1857 rebellion is more commonly known as the First War of Indpendence.  

Interesting. The distance between “Troubles”, “Rebellion,” and “Mutiny” from “civil war,” “revolution,” and “war of independence.”  The terminology and the fight over it, though, are not surprising.  For the British, minimising these revolts to minor occurrences makes sense in the name of justifying continued British imperialist presence.  This is especially the case for Lower Canada and India, perhaps much less so for 20th century Northern Ireland.  On the other hand, “civil war,” “revolution,” and “war of independence” also carry a lot more weight from the other, oppressed sides.  These words work to serve the rebels’ purposes.

It is worth noting, though, I have never heard anyone seriously refer to the 1837 Rebellion in Lower Canada as a revolution, even amongst nationalist/separatist circles.  Unlike the case of the Troubles and the Indian Rebellion, I have included the Lower Canadian conflagration here due to an argument made by an academic, as opposed to common usage. 

But.  I do think the battle over terminology for different circumstances in three very different corners of the British Empire (Ireland, it turns out, was both the first and is now the last of the English overseas colonies).  And which term one chooses says just as much about “which foot you kick with,” to use a Northern Irish turn of phrase, than anything else. 

I bring this up due to a series of conversations I have been involved with of late, both in real time and on social media, about power and privilege.  And, certainly, tied up with questions of power and privilege are the rights to name events and items.  A similar process can be seen in the naming of the landscape in any colony.  Take, for example, Lake Superior.  As Gordon Lightfoot reminds us in my favourite of his songs, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the Ojibwe called the lake gichigami,” which means, literally, “great sea.”  (It’s also worth noting that Lightfoot calls the Ojibwe the Chippewa, the name the Europeans gave them) But, when the French arrived, they re-named the body of water Lac Supérieure, due to both its size and the fact it is the head of the Great Lakes. Literally, Lac Supérieure means “upper lake,” as in it is above Lake Huron.  Lake Superior is simply an angicisation (though technically incorrect) of the French name.  

Such is how power and privilege work.  And when the formerly oppressed/subjugated/colonised people gain a modicum of power and/or independence, name changing abounds.  For example, in my hometown, take the case of Dorchester Boulevard.  It was renamed in honour of René Lévesque upon his death in the late 80s. Guy Carleton, first Baron Dorchester, was the Governor General of Canada following the Conquest (which is called La conquête in French, if you were wondering).  Lévesque was the first separatist premier of Quebec, from 1976-84.  Or, take the case of Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay.  I could go on. I won’t. I’ll stop here.