The Belfast Project was an oral history project launched by Boston College to collect personal testimonies of people involved in paramilitary violence in the Troubles of Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The oral history testimonies collected by the Belfast Project were highly sensitive and eventually were subpeoned by law enforcement authorities for use in prosecutions.

The resulting lawsuits unraveled the entire oral history project.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education asserts that “What is clear is that in Belfast the past lives on. The investigations into Jean McConville’s death and others who disappeared during the Troubles are mired in political infighting. Giant murals celebrating the martyrdom of fighters on both sides are daily reminders to passing shoppers of what was sacrificed. The so-called peace walls, a series of metal, concrete, and barbed-wire barriers erected during the Troubles to provide buffers between Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods…