Yes, I saw the news. I’m in The Hague this week but will try to write on this tonight. With the jet lag I’m up till three anyways.

PS – your welcome Joel!

(And, forgot to write, thank you Bridget.)

Not clarified as yet, then. Who knows?

On the additional point, O’Rawe, like Anthony McIntyre, supports the peace, but not necessarily the process. His name was bandied about by Ed Moloney in the Irish Times yesterday, responded to by Danny Morrison today:
http://www.irishtimes.com/debate/letters/boston-history-project-1.1802795 (link to Moloney in Morrison)

Joel, thanks for your patience. In order to prevent spam, I manually approve each commenter’s first comment, which can take a while depending on my schedule. Once you’ve had a comment approved, you can publish comments without waiting for moderation, assuming you use the same email address.

Perhaps Mr Moloney’s potential liability is included (implicitly?) in Mr O’Rawe’s suit.

Also, how did Mr O’Rawe’s participation become public knowledge? We know of the participation of two deceased interviewees, Brendan Hughes and Dolores Price, due to Ed Moloney including some Hughes testimony in his book, Voices from the Grave, and because Price gave an interview to a Belfast newspaper, followed by Moloney taping her and putting that testimony in the Boston College archive. The PSNI presumably asked for and received that Price interview.

How did O’Rawe come into the pubic domain in this context? Is it because Mr O’Rawe’s “solicitor Kevin Winters said the university had handed over a recording of Mr O’Rawe which did not discuss Mrs [Jean] McConville” (quote from report linked above). Is Mr O’Rawe therefore a self-declared participant in the project?

Was O’Rawe’s testimony used by the PSNI in the attempt to gather information with which to charge Gerry Adams with IRA membership? Will a Belfast court construe Mr Rawe’s recorded memory of violent events, construed as criminal behavior by the British state, as information it was his legal duty to divulge in the first place?

A mess, getting messier.

Well, I guess we’ll see!

As this story says, BC agreed in writing to set up an oversight committee to manage the collection of interviews, but never did. That seems like clear negligence. As does this, from the same story:

“Even so, the contracts with interviewees made no mention of legal limits on confidentiality. ‘I am working on the wording of the contract to be signed by the interview[ee], and I’ll run this by Tom [Hachey] and university counsel,’ Mr. O’Neill wrote to Mr. Moloney in early 2001, the day the journalist signed on as project director. Mr. O’Neill never did check with a lawyer about the wording.”