BOSTON — Boston College officials said Tuesday that they would relinquish their secret interviews with former Irish paramilitaries if the interviewees, who spoke years ago under a guarantee of confidentiality, wanted them back.

The college, which is the repository for an oral history project on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was forced by court order last year to give up tapes and transcripts of some of the highly sensitive interviews to the Police Service of Northern Ireland as it investigates unsolved murders and disappearances.

The release of the material alarmed many who had cooperated with the project, and they have been seeking to retrieve their own interviews. The college said it could not provide them until now because the archives had been closed by the United States Department of Justice until the litigation was over.

The interviews that were released earlier provided the basis for the surprising arrest last week of Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the former political arm of the Irish Republican Army and now one of Northern Ireland’s leading parties.