Burning Belfast at Boston College

“University library”: the words conjure up an image of dust-covered volumes in a musty, dimly-lit room, overseen by an octogenarian perpetually telling boisterous undergraduates to “hush”. But last week, the Burns Library at Jesuit-run Boston College, a private research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, found itself in the middle of a criminal and political maelstrom of the first order.

Police in Northern Ireland arrested the Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams on suspicion of complicity in the 1972 murder of Jean McConville (Adams has since been released and it is doubtful he will be charged in the murder). Mrs McConville, a mother of 10, was kidnapped, killed and secretly buried by the IRA (Irish Republican Army), becoming of the so-called “Disappeared” victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles. The authorities based their suspicions on interviews given by former leaders in both the IRA and the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) to the Belfast Project, an oral history of the Troubles conducted by Boston College. Those interviews had been the subject of extensive litigation in the United States for several years.