The dustup over US prosecutors’ stooging for British authorities in the quest for Boston College’s IRA oral history archives has spilled over into the social mediascape.
Say hello to @BCSubpoenaNews, a new Twitter feed that promises to “Keep [you] up to date on the latest news involving Boston College’s fight against the subpoenas seeking the Burns Library’s Belfast Project Oral History of the IRA.”
No explicit mention of who’s behind the effort, but this Twitter gravatar –
– and this BostonCollegeSubpoena blog certainly point to BC’s Burns Library. (Also see the site’s Chris Bray-Cliopatria link.)
[UPDATE: From an excellent, although anonymous, commenter: “[P]erhaps you should have scrolled all the way down the home page where, lo and behold, you would have read this: ‘This site is not affiliated with nor endorsed by Boston College. All material on the site is publicly available.’”]
BC is clearly in this for the long run, although Kevin Cullen’s Saturday Boston Globe piece indicates that the donnybrook is getting more complicated:
The two men who organized and carried out the interviews of former IRA members for Boston College’s oral history project on the conflict in Northern Ireland have filed suit, seeking to intervene in the legal dispute between the school and US prosecutors seeking BC’s records.
Ed Moloney, who directed the oral history project, and Anthony McIntyre, who interviewed 26 former Irish Republican Army members for the project, sued in US District Court in Boston, asking to argue on their own behalf separately from BC.
Which seems to be problematic for the college:
Moloney said his and McIntyre’s suit complements the legal arguments that BC lawyers have filed. He acknowledged that the pair’s legal approach frames the case in more political terms.
“This is to supplement, not conflict with, BC’s action, and we are doing it because it is a much more political approach,’’ said Moloney, who last year wrote a book, “Voices from the Grave,’’ based in large part on Hughes’s interviews with McIntyre.
BC was cool in its response.
“We obviously share the same goal in the outcome of this matter, but these filings, which we are just now reviewing, may not necessarily reflect the views of Boston College,’’ said Jack Dunn, a BC spokesman.
Translation: Three’s a crowd.
More complications, no doubt, to come.
