Neglect of archives shows contempt for citizens

CULTURE SHOCK:The chaos in public policy concerning archives in general, and health records in particular, demonstrates the Government's lack of concern for people who records are - by law - in its care

IN MAY 2008, a woman searching for her cat near Glounthaune, outside Cork city, came across hundreds of intact files at an old landfill site. They were records from the 1970s and 1980s from St Finbarr’s and Cork University hospitals. The HSE said it had no idea how they got there. It was not the first time that dumped medical files had been found in Cork, but it was a particularly dramatic illustration of the effects of the chaos in public policy concerning archives in general and health records in particular.

Anyone with an interest in Irish history, at either a local or a national level, is probably aware of the crisis in our archives. The National Archives are almost literally full and forced to move material into unsuitable off-site storage in order to make way for the new records that have to be taken in every year. There is no coherent policy on the retention of the digital documents that now make up the bulk of official records. The Government has not bothered to re-appoint the statutory National Archives Advisory Council since the last term of office ended in November 2007 – a breach of the law that suggests a degree of outright contempt. Official policy is dominated by a hare-brained notion of merging the National Archives and the National Library.

It is easy to dismiss all of this as a matter of concern only to professional historians. It actually goes to the heart of something much larger – our collective notions of who we are. What is at stake is our ability to define our own reality. We’ve learned in the most painful way, principally from the Ryan report into the industrial school system, that the successful occlusion of some of the darkest aspects of Irish life allows us to lie about ourselves. Those lies are toxic.

One of the things that happens when the preservation of records is neglected is a strengthening of the tendency for history to be written by – or at least from the perspective of – the winners. The records of government and high diplomacy will probably survive. What get lost are the vestiges of the lives of the ordinary, the anonymous, the vulnerable. The stray traces of those with whom society was careless in life tend to be treated carelessly in death.

In recent years, for example, there has been a realisation that the records held within the health system are a crucial repository of ordinary Irish lives. In 2006, University College Dublin and the University of Ulster got funding from the Wellcome Trust to establish the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland. Its current research projects – on areas such as the relationship between Irish migration and mental illness, child and maternal welfare and sexual health – give a flavour of the ways in which ordinary lives can be illuminated.

Yet, even as this field of historical writing is beginning to flower, the records on which it is based are in increasing danger. The problem is simple: there is no statutory protection for the archives of medical institutions. Local county archives have usually inherited (by custom and practice) the files of the workhouses, poor law unions and health boards. (Though not all county councils actually employ a trained archivist.) Other records, however, seem to be acquired or dumped on an almost random basis.

No one has a duty to preserve them or, when appropriate, to destroy them. There are no laws to say what records should be kept, when they should be opened to scrutiny and who should have access to them.

The problem is particularly acute in one of the most important areas. It is impossible to understand the way Irish society worked up until very recently without exploring its incarceration of tens of thousands of people in prison-like mental hospitals. The mental hospitals were the third side of the Bermuda Triangle of Irish social control, alongside the industrial schools and the Magdalen homes.

Many of these institutions are now being dismantled. But there’s no coherent plan for what should happen to the archives that contain the traces of so many lost lives. National Archives staff have been trying to find homes for some of the records. The files from hospitals in Cork, Ennis and Sligo have been transferred either to county council care or to the National Archives. But the broader picture is chaotic. The HSE is not particularly interested, the National Archives have no space, and local councils may or may not have the facilities even to preserve the files, let alone arrange for proper maintenance and access. And with no legal framework, no one can make the crucial decisions about which files should be kept from scrutiny to preserve privacy and which should be available to researchers or to people tracing relatives and ancestors.

There’s a particularly bitter edge to this neglect of mental hospital records. The people who are the subjects of those records were usually locked away in order to be forgotten. Their very existence was often denied.

Their excision was part of Irish society’s construction of a version of itself that could be maintained only by relentless and often violent exclusion. And now we are continuing that process of collective denial and completing that work of obliteration.

This is just one aspect of the wider crisis in Irish archives, but it is perhaps the one that suggests most clearly what we are dealing with. We are at a moment in our history when all sorts of illusions about who we are have been stripped away by the harsh winds of economic collapse, dark revelation and the collapse of the institutional Catholic Church. We need, as never before, an honest engagement with our collective experience. The archives are the memory banks in which the traces of those experiences are stored. If we are careless with what they tell us about the past, we will construct a future of delusions.

Fintan O’Toole, Diarmaid Ferriter, Catriona Crowe and Eunan O’Halpin will speak this afternoon at a public symposium on Archives in Crisis at 3 pm in the Robert Emmet Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin