(no subject)

[skygiants]

Staring desperately down the barrel of my booklog backlog but there simply is no way out but through! So we'll begin with something I've already been talking about extensively in one of my groupchats, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Modern Ireland.

This book had been on my radar for a while after seeing several friends speak highly of it but what pushed it to the top of the list was the realization that I knew appallingly little about the Troubles, a topic that one might wish to be conversant with if one was to, say, hypothetically, be discussing a work of children's literature written in the seventies about an Irish child whose father is a prisoner of the British government.

Despite the fact that one of the people who'd recommended the book was a grad school classmate, I somehow had no idea that the inciting event for this indeed very informative book about the Provisional IRA and the early years of the Troubles -- its central structural conceit -- is one of the biggest archival scandals of the 2010s!

For those unfamiliar with the controversy (and I have no idea how familiar most people may be with the controversy, this is definitely a feldspars moment for me) what happened was that Boston College, a Catholic Jesuit university with its roots in Boston's Irish immigrant population, launched an oral history project about the Troubles that included hundreds of highly sensitive interviews with major players from both sides of the conflict. Despite the fact that in theory these interviews were supposed to remain closed and protected until the participants were safely dead, they were shortly thereafter subpoena'd by the British government in order to prosecute some of the participants, which nobody was able to prevent, because, it turns out, nobody involved in the project had ever consulted a lawyer.

The specific murder was that of Jean McConville, who was disappeared in 1972; the book intersperses the circumstances of her death and the aftermath for her ten children with the stories of Provisional IRA volunteers Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, who were both interviewed for the Boston College oral history project, as well as their colleague and now-politician-emeritus Gerry Adams. Despite being a very chunky book, it was a pretty quick read and in style reminded me a little bit of Killers of the Flower Moon -- both of them use some of the tools out of the nonfiction thriller box to examine larger structural and societal issues -- but whereas Killers of the Flower Moon sometimes got so True Crime-y in voice and structure that I found it distracting, Say Nothing felt much less to me like it was leaning on artificial suspense to keep the reader invested. The events and people under discussion were plenty interesting enough on their own merits.

... even without reckoning in the EXTREMELY INTERESTING TO ME PERSONALLY archives scandal. I truly do not want to overshadow the rest of the book, which really is a very compelling and pretty nuanced exploration of the early years of the Troubles and the sunk cost fallacy of violence, with my personal professional interests. However, I graduated archives school in 2013 and was industriously attending the conference circuit in 2014 and everyone was talking about this -- and now that I've read the book and learned more detail, I'm even more scandalized. You run an oral history project like this?!

Comments

[raven]

Part of me sees how this could happen - Our Kind of Law is specialist, expensive and in the US, doesn't even have the hefty institutional weight behind it - but also, that no one thought of it. No one at all.

[raven]

ps. Idk how informative i can be about the Troubles, but at least a little - my in-laws are from NI, of course (my mother-in-law's family home was blown up by the IRA in the early seventies) and what with being from the northwest a lot of it was really vivid when I was growing up, I was actually in Manchester on the day of the bombings. How that translates to knowing the politics of it all I don't know, but I certainly have a vivid memory of what they felt like, of the news reports and the weird quotidian-ness of it all, Gerry Adams with his actor's voice and bins being banned on stations and the way everyone of my generation in the northwest knows how to pronounce "Omagh" and "Fermanagh".

[ethelmay]

One of my g-g-grandfathers was from Fermanagh.

[skygiants]

In 1996?! god, I can imagine that's something that you wouldn't forget in a hurry. (I actually did not know your in-laws were from NI!)

[raven]

Yeah, A. is an Ulster Scot, of a type - his mum came from a prominent family of Northern Irish Protestants in Antrim who suffered a lot during the Troubles. My MIL is just charmingly chill about the whole thing. She was in London on the day of the 7/7 bombings and her friends and colleagues were, naturally, FREAKING OUT, while she was just like, yeah, major capital city under paramilitary lockdown because of violent terrorist attack, did that a dozen times before I was ten, follow me. And she proceeded to lead them calmly out through the cordon! It is incredible to me, but as she says, if you didn't grow up in a war zone, there's no way of explaining it to you what it was like.

[redbird]

Yes that's a relatively expensive specialist area of law, but Boston College is a Jesuit institution, and also includes a law school. Did nobody working on this project think to ask the law school for advice, or what?

[raven]

I don't know if the law school would cooperate if asked, though? They're academics, they can't give real legal advice because they wouldn't be protected against any liability arising, and I don't know if many US law schools could advise effectively on the historical constitutional law of another sovereign state.

[redbird]

I would expect the law school to be able to give advice about whether the researchers' promises to keep the material secret would be effective, even if the answer was "you need an expert in X subfield" or "you should talk to a British lawyer" rather than "of course you're OK, Massachusetts has thus-and-such rules."

[raven]

An English lawyer, not a British one, and I guess it must be the difference between jurisdictions that accounts for it.

[kate_nepveu]

yeah, Boston College has actual legal counsel who would be in the proper attorney-client relationship for a question like this! (source: my husband works for a much smaller college that definitely has a lawyer)

[raven]

Oh, that's different! In-house counsel isn't the bloody law school (she says, having dealt with legal academics much too much). I would love to be the in-house counsel for an American educational institution that gets this query one fine day. Are we opening ourselves up to prosecution by the remnants of an institutionally violent colonising state? uh. maybe?

[skygiants]

from experience I can say that pretty much every institutional archive has some contact in the institution's legal department whose job is to worry about things like this, and if the contact in the legal department has not expressed Concerns, it is because that everybody knew they were going to express Concerns and therefore has procrastinated on asking them.

[skygiants]

the thing that kills me really specifically is that at one point the person in charge looked at the draft agreements that were to be signed by participants [who, again, knew that they would be Confessing To Crimes and also putting themselves at genuine risk of retribution by their old colleagues who had not consented to having these crimes confessed about], said 'great, I'll run this by our legal team to be sure' and then just. didn't. just didn't at all.

[kate_nepveu]

...

...

no I can't even

[osprey_archer]

What. what. WHAT?

Okay I maybe have to read this now. Such a trainwreck. WHAT.