The PSNI Arrives on Tuesday for a Monday Lunch

They're too late.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland recently announced that they intended to make a broader MLAT request for every interview from the Boston College oral history collection they first began to mine in 2011. But Boston College also announced that it intended to return interviews to the former members of Northern Ireland paramilitary organizations interviewed for the university's Belfast Project. For a while, it appeared that the PSNI's announcement trumped BC's announcement: The news that more subpoenas were on the way would prevent the return of interviews.

For at least one Belfast Project interviewee, however, that's not what happened. Whether or not the PSNI gets the U.S. Department of Justice to subpoena the Boston College archives again, some of the interviews are out of their hands forever. They have already gone home.

Take a look at this remarkable set of documents that was posted on Pacer, the federal court system's document website, on Thursday:

NBC O'Rawe from PACER by chrisabray

Of particular interest are pages 3 and 4 of the PDF file, a May 1, 2014 letter from Jeffrey Swope, Boston College's outside lawyer for matters involving the Belfast Project, to Kevin Winters, the Belfast-based solicitor who represents former IRA member and Belfast Project interviewee Richard O'Rawe. Swope details a long list of documents and audiotapes that he is returning to O'Rawe through the offices of KRW Law, Winters' Belfast law firm. They are all of O'Rawe's interviews -- tapes and transcripts -- except the ones that the PSNI already received on account of the 2011 subpoenas. Also returned: O'Rawe's complete correspondence with the Belfast Project. There's nothing left but the material that police already have.

I don't know if material from other interviewees has already been sent back to them. Boston College and Jeffrey Swope have long since stopped responding to questions from me, and other people who would know about the return of interviews are either not responding to messages or not saying. (And I wouldn't respond to the questions I'm asking them, either, if our positions were reversed.) But if Boston College began returning interviews, there's no reason for them to have returned interviews to Richard O'Rawe but not to other interviewees, some of whom have been asking for the return of their interview material since shortly after the 2011 subpoenas arrived.

Bottom line: At least one interviewee has beat the PSNI to the archive, and maybe more. (Interviews that are unlikely to have been returned, and that are unlikely to ever be returned, are those for which Boston College has lost identifying material. So the PSNI may still be able to get its hands on interviews with unidentifiable research subjects, the legal value of which will be limited.)

Meanwhile, the political floor is beginning to give way beneath the PSNI's effort to treat the Troubles as ordinary crime.

The likelihood of a successful PSNI / DOJ return to the Belfast Project archives is rapidly fading.