By Maria Luddy
I have been researching Irish history for over 40 years and have never tired of visiting archives, talking to archivists, searching catalogues, locating material on current interests and looking for inspiration in previously unknown sources for what I might study next. The last twenty years or so have seen enormous changes in how we can research material. The digitisation of sources such as newspapers, maps, parish registers, family papers, catalogues and official records like the Bureau of Military History statements has been a tremendous boon to researchers. All of these resources can be used from home and open up Irish history to a vast audience.
Such access to original sources might suggest that historians of Ireland and those interested in Irish history are living in a golden era of access to Irish historical documents. Over the last few years, however, I have noticed some serious issues emerging in my own work in archives, in particular the closure or inaccessibility of records and legal constraints on key aspects of Irish history since 1923.
For example, Catholic and Protestant diocesan archives exist around the country. Some have no archivist, which is presented as the reason why researchers cannot access the material. The Catholic Cloyne diocesan archive is probably one of the best in the country. I was last there in the late 1990s but over the past ten years I have failed on numerous occasions to access this archive. Many convent archives are no longer accessible, particularly of those that ran institutions such as industrial schools, Magdalen asylums and mother and baby homes. Furthermore, many convents around the country have closed or are closing owing to an elderly demographic factor and a lack of new recruits. What is happening to the valuable archives of those communities? Are they being centralised? What will happen when these communities no longer exist? Will convent resources that detail the educational, social and religious history of the communities in which they operated be lost to us? Are we also to lose the architectural history of the buildings associated with these religious communities, their convents and their institutions?
Additional issues arise from the work of the commissions of inquiry over the last three decades. Researchers are all aware of the great difficulties with access to documents used by the commissions. Indeed, all these documents are closed to researchers. Legal experts, historians and campaigners have fought for the retention of these records and access to them by the individuals who suffered in the various institutions. Those battles continue, but there is another aspect to these records that causes me concern.
I was curious to discover what records Tusla, the child and family agency, held relating to the mother and baby homes. Under freedom of information (FOI) legislation, Tusla informed me that the records they held related to about 100 organisations and institutions that dealt with unmarried mothers, the boarding out of children, home assistance and adoption agencies. Within these records there are local authority reports of publicly funded institutions such as county homes, and records relating to boarding out. All of the records held by Tusla are closed to researchers. The majority have been digitised, but Tusla has not returned the original documents to their original repositories. How can that be justified? What is the legal basis by which publicly funded local authority records were acquired by Tusla and then closed to research? The local authorities that handed over their records to Tusla now have a major gap in their archives and the integrity of those archives is compromised. A whole tranche of records have been literally removed from the historical record.
Another set of records in which I was interested were lunatic asylum records, most going back to the mid-nineteenth century. I thought that this would be a very uncontentious search for information, but it proved to be surprisingly complicated. I saw many of these hospital records in the late 1990s when working on the Women’s History Project (see HI 31.3, May/June 2023). Many were stored in the basements and empty rooms of hospitals. Some have since been deposited in local archives but others appear to remain within closed hospitals. The records of St Finan’s Hospital in Killarney, which go back to at least 1853, were deposited by the HSE in the Kerry County Library in Tralee in 2012. There is still no list of those records and no access policy regarding them.
I sought information on a sample of nine hospitals around the country. Most of the HSE offices that I contacted under FOI, which appeared to be the only way to get a response from them, either knew nothing of the records in their care or gave me incorrect information, not only about the extent of the records, or that they existed at all, but also about where they were kept and about access to them. Many records were not open to researchers, even those from the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the HSE officers cited data protection under FOI as a reason why these records are closed.
One HSE officer informed me that they were waiting for national guidelines on access that were being devised by a working group established in July 2020, which saw the HSE in discussions with the Grangegorman Histories Project. A further FOI relating to this group revealed that between 7 July 2020 and 17 January 2023 five meetings were held, but there is still no formal guidance on access to mental hospital records. I discovered that one of the suggestions made within this working group was that it should be normal practice that material over 100 years old be made available to researchers without resorting to the HSE for permission. When will this become formal guidance? Another piece of information that I discovered in this request to the HSE in Dublin was that there was no professional historian on this working group.
And what is the situation regarding the deposit of government department records? Under the 1986 Archives (Ireland) Act, government departments are required by law, with some exceptions, to deposit any material that is 30 years old in the National Archives of Ireland. There are many departments that do not adhere to this legal requirement. One arm of government with which I had some issues was the Prison Service. The Prison Service, through the Department of Justice, had deposited or transferred (apparently there is a difference in the meaning of these terms) to the National Archives of Ireland what are called ‘closed prisoner records’ that date from between c. 1922 and 1976. About five researchers over the years had been given access to many of these records but when I asked to see them I was told that they were not open. Months of queries and finally letters to the minister for justice and the director of the Prison Service secured access. I believe the reason why I was initially denied access to these twentieth-century records was a fear that I would make public sensitive information about people still living. This highlights a key problem that historians and researchers face—a misunderstanding of legislation.
Under FOI and other relevant legislation no living person can be identified or identifiable. There was never any intention under FOI legislation to make it impossible to research modern history. And under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) archivists and historians are expected to work together to ensure that records from the twentieth century can be accessed and used for research purposes. The best way of illustrating how this works is to look at how infanticide cases in twentieth-century Ireland have been studied by historians. In such studies, identifying features such as names and addresses have been altered but the detail of cases can still be provided and the resource information can be used to provide statistics and other forms of analysis.
I could go on and note records that I saw in archives and museums in the 1990s that now appear to be missing, or discuss the numerous deposits of papers that exist in archival repositories that are still not properly listed or catalogued and thus unavailable to researchers. Anyone interested in Irish history should be concerned with how access to records is being reduced in this country through misunderstanding of legislation, fear, inefficiency and lack of resources. I have met numerous historians frustrated by the inaccessibility of departmental records of the Irish government.
So what is required? There needs to be an awareness that there is a problem. There must be accountability within government departments for placing material in the National Archives of Ireland—the sole repository for all State archives. Along with this, there needs to be a discussion among religious communities, historians, archivists and others about what happens to their records when many such communities are closing. Finally, if there are official working groups discussing access to archives, there must be representation by professional historians.
The existence and accessibility of historical documents matters.
Maria Luddy is Professor Emeritus of Irish History at Warwick University.