(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

[sovay]

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.

I remember that happening! I should probably read this book.

[kate_nepveu]

sometimes lawyers are useful!!!!

[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.

[osprey_archer]

Oh this sounds fascinating! I've gotten a bit interested in The Troubles for Derry Girls reasons, too, although my knowledge is still very very vague... The archives scandal side of things also sounds so interesting.

[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".

[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.

[ethelmay]

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

[umadoshi]

nobody was able to prevent, because, it turns out, nobody involved in the project had ever consulted a lawyer.

*chokes* They. They what?!?!?!

[kore]

I loved that book -- it was excellent. His Empire of Pain is great, too.

[aella_irene]

Amazingly this very subject came up in a work meeting last week regarding cases when ethical consideration might be needed not of research, but of the impact in this research, and people were saying "Remember when Americans tried to get our data" and not one person said "Remember Boston College". Incredible.

I am amazed this got past Boston College's ethics board, because surely you'd ask about protections!

[slowparts]

Oh, Say Nothing is so good. I read it a couple years ago. But I had absolutely no idea about the context around the controversy! I have no background in archive matters but even to my layman's eye that just seems like ludicrously bad form, lmao. Had no idea such things could happen, but I would at least hope the people whose LITERAL JOB it is to store this information safely have some idea!!

[slashmarks]

I have been previously informed that xyz IRA board, which I am not naming for reasons that will soon be obvious, is great because they understand their real purpose is medical research and they should just greenlight social science/humanities without worrying about it. I am not even slightly surprised.

[sophia_sol]

oh man. definitely a feldspar moment as far as I am concerned at least -- I never heard of this major archives scandal! but my god, what an oversight on their part, holy shit.

[chestnut_pod]

Staring desperately down the barrel of my booklog backlog but there simply is no way out but through! -- oh, we've all been there! *cheers you on*

Also, oh my god, I had never heard of this, and WHAT. And also, this is why IRBs are bullshit.

[bloodygranuaile]

I loved this book, it was so good, it's being turned into a TV show now apparently? I had heard a bit about the Boston College archives scandal from an episode of the Irish History Podcast when I read it, and it was weird reading it in Boston and being like "oh yeah, that's right down the street" when the rest of the book is about places I've never been 3,000 miles away.

I read a handful of Troubles books last year, there seems to be a rush of new ones? Anyway I would highly recommend both Rory Carroll's There Will Be Fire about the IRA's assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher (ie the Brighton Hotel bombing) and Henry Hemmings' Four Shots in the Night about double agents. Both have that similar sort of narrative nonfiction wrote-it-like-a-spy-thriller vibe going on, although I do think Say Nothing executes it best by just a hair. They really teach those New Yorker staff writers how to structure a story.

[bloodygranuaile]

misread what IRA stands for in this comment at first and was momentarily VERY confused

[lirazel]

I remember thinking this book was very good, but frankly, I want to read an entire book focused on the archival scandal!

[slashmarks]

LOL, whoops, that was a typo. Your confusion was justified!

[obopolsk]

Not only did I find this book fascinating, but it's also the only book I can think of other than the Harry Potters that all four members of my immediate family liked.

[skygiants]

It was more or less the first thing I ever knew about Boston College! my neighbor that makes bad archives choices!

[skygiants]

SOMETIMES IT REALLY IS IMPORTANT FOR ARCHIVES WORK NO MATTER HOW MUCH WE ALL MIGHT LIKE TO PRETEND OTHERWISE

[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.

[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]

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!)

[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)

[skygiants]

I'd definitely recommend the book if you're at all interested and I would LOVE to talk about it with you if you do.

[skygiants]

THEY WERE BUSY AND IT JUST SLIPPED THEIR MINDS

[skygiants]

Thank you for the rec, I was wondering if anything else he'd written was as good!

[skygiants]

Remember Boston College!! It really seems like somehow the project slipped past pretty much EVERYBODY who might have been expected to raise a red flag, largely because most of the people directly were people who had impressive and relevant credentials from entirely outside the field of oral history or archives and thus had no idea; their main plan to protect the archive was 'keep it completely secret' and they almost immediately tripped and fell on their whole face about that.

[skygiants]

LUDICROUSLY BAD. I was reading sections between my fingers. My main comfort is that it does not actually really seem like any BC archivists were involved with the project, it was all decisions made by people who'd been hired for their credentials with regard to the Troubles with no oral history or archival training whatsoever asdj;flkdj and like it's important to have your subject experts! but you also probably do need people who know what they're doing, professionally!

[skygiants]

It's also definitely relevant that it was a local archives scandal, to me, so it was probably overrepresented as a discussion point at, say, the New England Archivists association .... but YEAH. HOLY SHIT.

[kate_nepveu]

...

...

no I can't even

[skygiants]

I have no memory of the book even MENTIONING an IRB tbh -- like I'm sure they must have and I'm sorry now that it's already back at the library because I'd like to look it up, but clearly they didn't think or talk about it a whole lot!!

[skygiants]

A TV show! That's fascinating, I wonder if they'll keep the archives frame story or just focus on the drama around Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes and the Prices? (Which to be fair is INTENSELY DRAMATIC.)

I've heard of There Will Be Fire but not Four Shots in the Night, thank you for the rec!

[skygiants]

I think the BC archivists are probably tired of talking about it which does not make me any less wish to befriend a BC archivist and make them talk about it!

[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]

man that really is high praise tbh!

[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.

[osprey_archer]

I have been thinking recently that I need more nonfiction in my reading diet too....

[osprey_archer]

What. what. WHAT?

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

[bloodygranuaile]

I mean I also misread "IRB" downthread as "Irish Republican Brotherhood" so then I figured that there was some sort of association of institutional review boards also called an/the IRA, or something. I often have the same double-take when I read anything about the Inflation Reduction Act or individual retirement accounts. It's rough out here in acronym-land for an Irish history buff, lol.

[pedanther]

Thank you for prompting me to move this book to the top of my to-read pile, it's great.

[pedanther]

It looks like the TV show is launching this week on Hulu/Disney+. IMDb's cast list doesn't include any of the Belfast Project people, for what it's worth, though it's got some visible gaps so they might still be in it.