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Boston College will be the repository for an archive of documents that chronicle the decommissioning of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groups — widely regarded as one of the most crucial steps on the road to peace in that troubled region.
The documents are from the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), appointed in 1997 to oversee the process of putting “beyond use” weapons used by combatants involved in the violence and aggression that marked the three decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles.”
Over the next decade, as the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was being implemented, the IICD worked with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Loyalist Volunteer Force, Ulster Volunteer Force, Ulster Defense Association and other paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland to verify that their weapons — including rifles, machine guns, explosives and missiles — were destroyed.
The commission’s voluminous documents from this undertaking — which include both Commission deliberations, as well as a few personal notebooks kept by IICD members — will now be housed in the Special Collections of Boston College’s John J. Burns Library. The decision to donate the materials was approved by the Irish Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen Peterson and Director of the Northern Ireland Office Hilary Jackson. The collection will be curated over time, and possibly digitized so that the documents may eventually be available, at least in part, on the Internet for scholars everywhere.
University Professor of History Thomas Hachey, executive director of the Boston College Center for Irish Programs, worked closely with Sean Aylward, secretary general of Ireland’s Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, to help secure the archive.
Hachey described the documents as an incredibly valuable collection for future studies on the era of “The Troubles.” “What the contents of the archive will reveal are the subtle nuances in the recorded deliberations that reflect the personal dispositions, reasoning and strategic maneuvers of the various participants during the negotiations.”
The real significance of the commission’s accomplishment “lies in the fact that the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, as well as the subsequent sustainability of the Northern Ireland Assembly and power sharing Executive,” said Hachey, “would have been fatally compromised without the IICD’s contribution to the peace process.”
Under Irish and British law, the archive could be inaccessible for a period of 30 years, a provision that comports with the embargo on government archives in much of the world at present, Hachey said. There will, however, be periodic review that may grant earlier access if approved by the appropriate Anglo-Irish authorities.
Given the controversy that would ensue over locating the archive in Dublin or Belfast, Hachey explained, Boston College represented a logical alternative, given its ties to Ireland and Northern Ireland: the Center’s Irish Studies Program faculty exchange program with Queens University Belfast; the Irish Institute’s federally funded executive leadership program for participants from North and South as part of the Department of State’s peace and reconciliation program; and the multiple initiatives in Northern Ireland overseen by the BC-Ireland office in Dublin.
In addition, Hachey said, Burns Library is recognized as having the most diverse and comprehensive holdings relating to Northern Ireland in the Western Hemisphere. These include the Center for Irish Programs’ oral history archive of Irish Republican Army and Ulster Volunteer Force participants; private papers of various Northern Irish poets and writers; the Bobby Hanvey photograph archive on “The Troubles”; the William Van Vorris papers; the William F. Stout papers; the Canon Rogers pamphlets on Northern Ireland; and the new Ulster Movement Archive.