Perspective: The TroublesWhy a 1972 Northern Ireland Murder Matters So Much to Historians
In a recent decision, a court in Northern Ireland ruled that evidence from an oral history project could not be considered in a 1972 murder case, clearing 82-year-old Ivor Bell of soliciting the killing of Jean McConville. Evidence from the Belfast Project, an oral history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, indicated Bell and other members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) kidnapped and murdered McConville because they incorrectly believed she had provided information to the British Army about IRA activity in Belfast. This evidence played an important role in Bell’s indictment and trial in the McConville case. This ordeal strained the relationship between legal justice and historical truth, Donald M. Beaudette and Laura Weinstein write. “Though in court, lawyers, judges and juries assess the guilt of alleged offenders according to well-honed rules of evidence and interpretations of the law, assessing historical truth is more complex,” they write. They argue that scholars “can and must write and speak more broadly about how historical interpretation works, so citizens are better equipped to understand that the dominant interpretation of history is not the only one, nor is it necessarily the correct one.”
In a recent decision, a court in Northern Ireland ruled that evidence from an oral history project could not be considered in a 1972 murder case, clearing 82-year-old Ivor Bell of soliciting the killing of Jean McConville. Evidence from the Belfast Project, an oral history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, indicated Bell and other members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) kidnapped and murdered McConville because they incorrectly believed she had provided information to the British Army about IRA activity in Belfast. This evidence played an important role in Bell’s indictment and trial in the McConville case.
Donald M. Beaudette and Laura Weinstein write in the Washington Post that this ordeal strained the relationship between legal justice and historical truth.
While legal decisions and records inform history, historians also draw on other types of records — including oral histories — to bring forward the voices of the weak or underrepresented. The courts evaluate evidence differently, weighing only information and testimony that conforms to strict legal standards that are designed to protect the rights of accused people, not to allow the consideration of all available sources. Integrity in the historical process, however, requires the consideration of every piece of evidence.
Beaudette and Weinstein note that Bell was implicated in McConville’s murder after the publication of Ed Moloney’s Voices From the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland in 2010. Moloney’s work drew on the Belfast Project, an oral history project that aimed to collect firsthand accounts from people who had participated in paramilitary activity on both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland. “The Troubles” refers to the period from 1969 to 1998, during which the IRA used violence in an attempt to force the British government off the island of Ireland. At the same time, loyalist paramilitaries deployed their own acts of terrorism in defense of Northern Ireland’s union with Britain, and atrocities were also committed by the British security forces. During that period, more than 3,500 people died.
