THOSE who hope to discover the truth about what happened during Northern Ireland’s Troubles have seen their cause set back for years as a consequence of the arrest of Gerry Adams.

The police’s decision to hold the Sinn Fein leader for questioning for four days stemmed from evidence obtained from the Boston College archive of testimonies — evidence given by republicans that was not intended to be made public during their lifetimes.

But with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) having won a legal battle in the US to access some of the archive — 10 tapes, it is believed — relating to the murder of Jean McConville, the value of the archive project has been thrown into question.

On May 5, Boston College announced it was prepared to give back taped recordings and other material to dozens of ex-IRA and loyalist paramilitaries who had taken part.

Experts who have written detailed histories of terror groups, as well as those involved in collating stories from combatants, say the use of the archive to detain and prosecute republicans has created a chill factor amongst those at the sharp end of four decades of violence.

One leading authority on the IRA’s armed campaign claimed the debacle would put off anyone involved in political violence from speaking the full truth about they did during the Troubles, while a former Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detective said a project he had been involved in to compile an archive from anti-terrorist police officers on both sides of the Irish border was now “completely dead in the water”.

But Gerry Adams has welcomed the proposed handover of the paramilitary archive because, while that would not halt the police investigation, it would render the archive worthless. The Sinn Fein leader has consistently denied any involvement in the abduction and murder of the widow whom the IRA accused of being an informer — a charge her family have always rejected.

It is understood that the Boston archive includes claims by both dead and living IRA members that Adams as a senior commander in the organisation in 1972 came up with the idea of “disappearing” McConville rather than publicly admit the terror group had killed her. The Belfast woman’s remains were not found until 2003 at a beach in the Irish Republic.

Historian Dr Richard English, who wrote the critically acclaimed history of the modern IRA, Armed Struggle, said that at the very least ex-paramilitaries and others would be much more circumspect about what they did during the years between 1969 and 1994. “People will be more wary of giving interviews, and probably much more selective both about those to whom they speak, and about what they are prepared to say.

“I still think it’s possible to conduct first-hand research, but one unfortunate and unintended consequence of the Boston College fiasco is that such work will in future be more difficult, which is a shame since first-hand evidence is so crucial,” English said.

The first academic casualty of the Boston College-Jean McConville furore has been a parallel project which was to involve a London-based historian and an ex-RUC officer as well as retired members of the Garda Siochana in the Irish Republic, all with long records in fighting terrorism.

Like the IRA and loyalists, the researchers had promised them none of their testimonies would be made public until they were dead.

Colin Breen, a retired RUC detective, said that once his successors in the PSNI were granted the right to seize those Boston College tapes allegedly relating to Adams’ supposed role in the McConville murder, his historical project was over.

Breen, currently writing his personal story of life as a policeman during the conflict, said: “I had approached numerous RUC officers who were keen to leave a living record of what went on in their fight against terrorism over the years. They felt history was being rewritten and the name of the RUC was being sacrificed for political expediency and were keen to give their account.

“But since the Boston tapes project took a different turn they have all changed their minds. As a result we will never know now what actually happened here and that I believe will prove to be a great loss for generations to come. Our project too is now dead in the water.”

Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA life sentence prisoner and chief researcher on the Belfast project, defended the archive and blamed Boston College for failing to make clear to him and the interviewees that there was a legal treaty that allowed the British state to seize academic material from the United States.

The PSNI invoked the US-UK mutual legal assistance treaty and won a landmark legal judgement in the US Supreme Court that resulted in Boston College authorities handing over 10 taped testimonies of IRA activists.

McIntyre said that during legal challenges against the tapes handover Boston-based Judge William Young, who read all the relevant interviews, described the project as a “bona fide academic exercise of considerable intellectual merit”.

McIntyre dismissed Gerry Adams’s description of the project as a “malicious” plot against him.

Defending the project, and in a reference to the “disappeared” — the 16 IRA victims including McConville who were secretly buried after being shot dead — McIntyre added: “Adams’s concern is that there are republican narratives which depict him as a Pinochet rather than a Mandela, and for that reason he would rather see them smothered.”

—By arrangement with the Guardian