This Wednesday in a Boston courthouse a crucial legal battle will be played out. It is a consequence of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) contempt for academic research and the protection of confidential sources. While the “troubles” in the North of Ireland may be over for most people, the PSNI is one state agency determined to poke at the hornets’ nest that is the region’s politically violent past. In doing so it displays wanton indifference to the caution urged by amongst others Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, a former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and current head of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, who warned that investigating the past “would blow apart the degree of consensus we have achieved.”

At the heart of the upcoming courtroom drama is an oral history project commissioned by Boston College between 2001 and 2006. Its aim was to enhance awareness of the long running violent political conflict in Ireland. It sought narratives from republican and loyalist activists who could offer unrivalled insight. It promised that all the material archived would be securely deposited in Boston College where it would remain inaccessible in all circumstances unless prior approval was given by the donor or the storyteller died.

The extent to which the PSNI is successful in its attempt to seize academic research will prove ruinous to public understanding of the Northern Irish conflict. It will drain the pool of knowledge that society may draw upon in order to keep itself better informed. The judicial outcome in a Boston courtroom will determine the ability of non-state actors, principally, academics, journalists and historians to collate information crucial to a more rounded public understanding. In the words of a prominent civil liberties lawyer in the US the move “could forever chill groundbreaking and important research.”

As it turned out Boston College, despite being equipped with a law school, was not on firm legal ground in issuing such promises of confidentiality, although nothing it drew up in its donor contract suggested that. Worse still, when it came to the crunch, the college — in an act of institutional deference to authority — was found to be afflicted by a fortitude deficit. In order not to offend the US Justice Department, it moved to abandon its own project, along with the researchers it commissioned and the research participants to whom it had promised the “ultimate power” of discretion over the use of their donations.

In May last year the PSNI applied through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty to US authorities to subpoena part of the archive ostensibly as part of an investigation into the 1972 killing and disappearing of Belfast woman, Jean McConville. A killing that the Northern Irish police force in all its guises failed to investigate in almost four decades. Historian Chris Bray, writing in the Irish Times, stated that “quite literally, not so much as a local patrolman ever bothered to type up a pro-forma report on McConville’s disappearance; the filing cabinet was nearly empty.” As a result the suspicion is being aired in many places that the real motivation behind the subpoenas is one meant to embarrass or prosecute Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams who, according to the Irish Times, has been accused by some of the Boston College research participants “of giving the order to kill McConville, a charge Adams categorically denies.”

In this precarious business it has not gone unnoticed that the Police Service of Northern Ireland, under its old name the RUC, was heavily involved in a dirty war often waged in the shadows. Its Special Branch was involved in a range of activities including killings. The Northern Irish police has a long history of torture, abuse and collusion with loyalist death squads. Like the British state it served, it was a key player in the conflict. Very few police members have been brought to book. It is unlikely that they ever will. There is a professed willingness on the part of the PSNI to pursue all leads … except those leading back to the British state.

This flags up one of the murky issues at play in the case. It is the problem of law enforcement agencies being used to prise open a past when much of the problems of the past were caused by law enforcement agencies. Because no law enforcement solution to the conflict was considered possible, a political one was devised that in many senses by-passed law enforcement or relegated in significance its contribution to a solution.  The jails previously packed by law enforcement measures were emptied of conflict prisoners as the North marched into the future and away from its past. Now we have law enforcement trying advance its own agenda under the camouflage of “rule of law”, feigning a concern for victims so that it may selectively and tendentiously mine the past.

The PSNI action in seeking access to the Boston College oral history archive, so that it might plunder it for material useful to prosecutions, has serious consequences for the production of knowledge. It is now likely that a diminution in information will flow to journalists or academics for fear that the State might insist on access to what is collated for purposes of criminal investigation. The action throws a chill of censorship over the societal acquisition of vital knowledge. By seeking to colonise academic research for its own narrow objectives, law enforcement is forcing academic study off the field of play leaving our comprehension of the past in the hands of law enforcement which has at all times sought to airbrush its own invidious role out of the historical record.  Hardly a satisfactory outcome.

This assault on academic freedom  will have a deleterious impact on public understanding and will  stymie public debate. As Harvey Silverglate and Daniel R. Schwartz argued in Forbes Magazine “academics play an important role in society for the enlightenment of current and future generations; they are not mere detectives bedecked in tweed and working for governments…”

Anthony McIntyre was one of the Boston College researchers who along with colleague Ed Moloney is currently fighting to have the subpoenas quashed. McIntyre is a former Republican prisoner

The post Northern Ireland Police threaten academic freedom appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The PSNI’s interest had been aroused by Breen’s Sunday Tribune stories relating to the deaths of two British soldiers in County Antrim in March and the killing of the informer Denis Donaldson in the Irish Republic three years ago. Breen, in her journalistic pursuit of the facts, spoke to the Real IRA. The organisation revealed to her that it had carried out all three killings.

Breen described the police visit:

‘Detectives wanted my computer, disks, notes, phone, and any material relating to stories I’d written about the Real IRA … I was given three days to comply. If I didn’t, they’d seek a court order under the Terrorism Act. I won’t be complying. The duty of a reporter to protect their sources is part of the National Union of Journalists’ code of conduct. It doesn’t matter whether those sources are police, paramilitaries, politicians, or civil servants … compromising sources undermines the freedom of the press. Journalists and police do different jobs. Our role is to put information into the public domain. If a journalist becomes a gatherer of evidence or witness for the state, they cease being a journalist.’

At the start of April, shortly after the killings of the two soldiers, the deputy first minister in Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, was reported in the Belfast Telegraph to have lambasted what he called ‘dissident journalists’ who give more attention to the Real IRA than Mr McGuinness felt appropriate. He was also said to have claimed that the journalists in question were ‘giving succour to these people’.

It was an approach previously adopted by McGuinness’s predecessors in the North, including Roy Mason who, to use the memorable phrase coined by Margaret Thatcher, sought to starve those politically violent groups of the oxygen of publicity.

When Martin McGuinness remarked on these ‘dissident journalists’, some of Suzanne Breen’s friends and colleagues, of whom I am one, contacted her to express concern. McGuinness had recently been given to criticising his former comrades, on one memorable occasion denouncing them as ‘traitors’, and it seemed any journalist seen to be publicising the claims or views of those former comrades would not escape his wrath. Now with the PSNI action against Breen the view that he was tipping the scales in favour of some sort of move against her has been reinforced.

Ms Breen had long been a thorn in the side of the minister and his party colleagues. She had delved deeper than most journalists into the workings of the Northern Ireland peace process. Sinn Féin often took umbrage at Breen’s journalism.

As has so often been the case in Northern Ireland it seems the journalists who ask the most difficult questions are those who receive the most hassle from the state and its security apparatuses. Ed Moloney, Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston prior to Suzanne Breen were hounded by the police. In their cases all three fought a determined action against police encroachment on journalistic sources and won the day.

If journalists gathering information to better inform the general public about their society, including the people that society outlaws, are forced to pass that information on to the state what possible chance of any of those outside the law coming forward with information that is essential for the enhancement of public understanding? Would society really be better off had Suzanne Breen not spoken to the Real IRA? As she argues ‘a new form of Section 31 won’t make the Real IRA go away, any more than the original affected the Provisionals’. Section 31 was the legislation which for long was used in the Irish Republic to censor Sinn Féin. It was a draconian power that kept the Irish public in a state of permanent ignorance about a problem that needed more rather than less information to solve it.

Commenting on the Moloney case of a decade ago Breen claimed that despite Moloney’s victory ‘the PSNI is pursuing the same strategy, against the same paper, with a different northern editor. It didn’t work then, and it certainly won’t work now.’ She went on to point out that over the years as a seasoned journalist she has interviewed people associated with many armed parties to the Northern conflict. No one from the state came harassing her. Why now?

Given that there is no information other than what she has already placed in the public domain that she can give to the police –– or should provide given that the only information she acquired was in her capacity as a journalist, and that should always remain off limits to the state –– the police investigation may have resulted from Martin McGuinness’s comments being interpreted as political pressure. If I am mistaken and Martin McGuinness opposes the PSNI concentration on Suzanne Breen then we can expect him to denounce it. So far he has not.

In an era much heralded as a new beginning, where political policing was supposed to have been a thing of the past there has been a strengthening of the type of powers long associated exclusively with political policing, including the use of 28-day detention period for people being questioned in police custody and the construction of a ‘supergrass’ unit in Maghaberry prison. This situation is exacerbated by the renewed assault on journalism.

The Sunday Tribune is backing its northern editor. Editor Nóirín Hegarty said: ‘this paper fully supports its northern editor. Our stories were clearly in the public interest. We stand firm in upholding journalistic ethics and the protection of sources, and we will continue to do so to the highest level.’

The National Union of Journalists is doing likewise. Its General Secretary Jeremy Dear commented: ‘if the police and security services believe they can force journalists to become part of intelligence-gathering operations, the very future of independent journalism will be put at risk.’

Professor Brice Dixon of Queen’s University’s Law School, and long the head of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, added his shoulder to the wheel: ‘It’s essential to the running of a healthy democracy that investigative journalists be allowed to go about their perfectly lawful activities without being impeded or constrained by police. What the PSNI are proposing to do is, in my view, a perversion of the Terrorism Act.’

Journalists and anti-censorship activists everywhere should rally behind this robust position and ensure that Suzanne Breen is not marginalised and subject to punitive sanction by the state. She has been an outstanding journalist in her coverage of the Northern Irish conflict. With those formerly on the receiving end of British state censorship now seemingly calling for more of it, journalists more than ever are left to defend the pass which the state should not be allowed to breach. Fearless journalists like Suzanne Breen cannot be allowed to become isolated and left to defend that pass on their own.

Anthony McIntyre is a former IRA prisoner and the author of Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism

The post Suzanne Breen: give them absolutely nothing appeared first on Index on Censorship.