Professional historians are used to working with incomplete sets of data

Brian Feeney’s opinion piece “There cannot be an official history of the Troubles’ (May 8) draws attention to the scandal of the so-called ‘migrated archives’ – the records of British withdrawal from Kenya, Aden, Malaya, Cyprus and 30 other colonies. The existence of this massive archive (8,800 files) only became public knowledge in 2011, as a result of the ‘Mau Mau case’, when five Kenyans successfully sued the British government for the torture and abuse that took place during the insurgency of the 1950s.

The ‘migrated archives’ were opened to historians more than a decade ago. They have been consulted by prominent scholars such as Caroline Elkins and David Anderson, who have exposed the brutality that characterised decolonisation. Their significance for our understanding of British imperialism is much debated, but that debate has long since escaped the attempts of the British government to control it. European states may seek to cover up the most shameful aspects of their imperial pasts. But as the case of the migrated archives demonstrates, they do not always get away with it.

Dr Feeney condemns historians involved in the current public history project on British policy in Northern Ireland. Do they really believe, he asks, that ‘the British haven’t destroyed stacks of files, just as they did from other colonial wars?” But the reason we know that the British destroyed papers relating to Kenya and other colonies is precisely because of the evidence discovered in the migrated archives. It was documented by scholars such as Elkins and Anderson, and confirmed by Tony Badger, the historian appointed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to review the transfer of the files to the National Archives.

The planned public history announced by the NIO is not a history of the Northern Ireland conflict, as Dr Feeney repeatedly states, but of British policy during that period. He fails to consider that professional historians are used to working with incomplete sets of data. The history of colonised countries has been largely based on incomplete records created by the colonisers. Good historians are trained to ask questions about how the intended and unintended processes of destruction have shaped the surviving evidence. Does Dr Feeney really think that we should decline an opportunity to find out more about which papers relating to Northern Ireland have been destroyed and why?

I have been teaching courses on the Northern Ireland conflict since 1997. Each year I enthusiastically recommend to my students Brian Feeney’s extraordinary biography Insider: Gerry Bradley’s Life in the IRA (2011). The book is based on privileged access to the prominent republican veteran Gerry Bradley. It must have made uncomfortable reading for some relatives of those killed by the IRA, who did not have the opportunity Dr Feeney had to question Bradley about his decades in the republican movement. Dr Feeney writes that historians footnote their sources so that others can examine them and check their interpretations and conclusions, but they can’t with an ‘official history’. This is equally true of Insider (the biography was based on exclusive interviews with Bradley, who has since died). But the book offers unrivalled insights into the life and attitudes of a key IRA volunteer, and historians must surely be grateful to Dr Feeney for co-writing it.

My intention is not to minimise the ethical challenges of the public history project. On the contrary, the plans for the project will be subject to an ethics review, drawing on the advice of academics with relevant expertise. Rather, I wish to point out that a fuller understanding of ‘the Troubles’ will depend on many sources – inevitably incomplete and inevitably reflecting the standpoint of one protagonist. Not all of them are freely accessible. 

Dr Feeney thinks that the British government has decided to fund five full-time experienced researchers, for five years each, appointed by a panel of independent academics, all in order to help them hide human rights abuses. He also thinks the British are so duplicitous that there is no point in historians examining thousands of unreleased documents. The Mau Mau case suggests otherwise.

IAN MCBRIDE, Professor of Irish History, Oxford