A chara, - The destruction of the public records of Ireland was, indeed, a tragedy, as Eoin Neeson, Tom Garvin and Anthony Quinn agree. But it had to be a likely turn of events once the Public Records Office was militarised and became a strongpoint of the Four Courts complex and war broke out.
Interestingly, that process of militarisation had been proposed by Sir Samuel Ferguson, head of the Record Office and president of the Royal Irish Academy, in a period of civil disturbance in 1882. He pressed on the Board of Works the need of fixing firing platforms and steel shutters to the Record Treasury so that his subordinate staff, army pensioners to a man, could use their rifles to good effect. Militarisation once considered, major loss becomes likely.
Mr Quinn wants the Civil War parties to apologise to us all. Should the Academy also apologise, should the poets of Ireland, Ferguson's heirs? More to the point might be an apology from the academic establishment and the members of the Law Library and others for the shameful neglect of what remained and of what was possible in the period from the 1920s to the mid-1970s. The destruction of records was a tragedy, one with parallels elsewhere and indeed at other times in Ireland. The destruction of an archival tradition and a record-keeping competence was all our own, and unique.
After a lapse of 50 years, and partly because of the example of the arrangements developed from scratch in Belfast, a small number of people put their influence behind the push for reform from inside the office. They did not include political scientists or lawyers. - Is mise,
GrΘag≤ir ╙ D·ill, An Ardaigh Bheag, Gort an Choirce, Co Dh·n na nGall.