HUGH Leonard, the award winning writer, presented his personal papers and archive to the National Library at Kildare Street, Dublin, yesterday. He has also committed himself to depositing all future writings with the library.
The Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Mr Higgins, accepted the papers on behalf of the library.
The donation is the life work, to date, of Hugh Leonard. It consists of original manuscripts of his plays, films and television scripts, books, talks, diaries, correspondence and other memorabilia, it also includes the first floppy disks which the library has received.
"I prefer to have the papers in my own country. I'm not outrageously nationalistic but their home is in Ireland. I'm not being altruistic I have no other purpose than giving the papers a good home, to a keeper who is less careless than me," Hugh Leonard said. "One of the few perks of donating my papers is that I now have space for my books," he said.
Mr Higgins pointed to the diaries in the archive as being particularly interesting. "His diaries constitute an unbroken record of the author's life, Irish society and the literary world since 1952," he said.
The Minister also expressed a hope that the donation would alert people to the existence of Section 176 of the 1995 Finance Act which provides incentives to donate literary and artistic work to the National Library and National Gallery.
Dr Patricia Donlon, the director of the National Library, approached Mr Leonard two years ago asking him to donate his manuscripts to the library. "At the time he made it clear that, other institutions were interested in his archive. So we'd are delighted that he has given them to the National, Library," Dr Donlon said.
She added that "it is truly impossible to put a market value on his personal papers. I wouldn't like to put a figure on it. Let me put it his way we definitely could not have gone out and bought them".
Dr Donlon said she hoped Hugh Leonard's donation would encourage more writers not to allow their manuscripts go abroad. She also hoped that the donation would bring more scholars and donations to the National Library.
Hugh Leonard's personal papers span 40 years of writing. They contain published and unpublished work, including A Leap in the Dark, which was first produced by the Abbey in 1957; A Tale of Two Cities, currently running at the Gate Theatre; award winning works such as A Life, Home Before Night, Out After Dark; and the film scripts of Great Catherine and Widow's Peak as well as other works.
The new archive is one of the most complete to reach the library. They will join the papers of other Irish writers such as Daniel O'Connell, William Smith O'Brien, W. B. Yeats, John Redmond and Padraic Pearse.