Who Killed Jean McConville? A Battle For IRA Secrets

A legal showdown is evolving. It affects an American university, the British government, a brutal Irish paramilitary organization and the murdered mother of 10 children.

Journalist Ed Moloney is fighting to keep secret interviews with former paramilitary members of the Irish Republican Army out of the British government’s hands. Those interviews are kept under lock and key at Boston College as part of an oral history project that Moloney started in 2001.

On July 6, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled in favor of the British government’s request to get transcripts of those secret interviews. But Moloney says the former militants only agreed to talk because they were assured the interviews wouldn’t be released until after they died.