By Catriona Crowe
On 13 June 2024, the Royal Irish Academy hosted a day-long symposium, Archives, Access and Human Rights. The idea originated from the Academy’s Historical Studies Committee and was organised by a working group that I chaired. We set about exploring two issues relating to access to archives: (1) difficulties with access to records that are currently in the National Archives and local authority archives, or to records that should be in the National or local authority archives; (2) lack of access to the records held by religious congregations, including those that ran industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, and lack of access to the records of the commissions of inquiry into these institutions.
At the outset, I had to explain the sad fact that the National Archives had declined to participate in the symposium. It was naturally the first institution that we approached, as it has statutory responsibility for government records and is also responsible for the archival element of the proposed Centre for Research and Remembrance on the site of the old Magdalene laundry at Seán McDermott Street, Dublin. I read out portions of the director’s response to our invitation, which did not address issues of transparency and accountability despite the fact that the National Archives is a public body centrally involved in the issues under discussion. Failure to appoint a new National Archives Advisory Council for over a year meant that there was no avenue of redress.
We were fortunate, however, to have a programme of excellent speakers who shed valuable light on issues of access to records, which have importance both for our right as citizens to know how we have been governed and for the transgressed human rights of those subjected to forced family separation and to incarceration in the various institutions for women and children which have been investigated over the last twenty years.
The morning session covered access to government and local authority archives. Niamh Ní Charra, chair of the Archives and Records Association, Ireland, was to open the event with a speech on ‘Public Archives, Access and the Role of Advocacy’, but sadly suffered a major bereavement some days beforehand. She kindly sent her notes to me and I conveyed them to the audience. She eloquently described the lack of resources and status that characterises the work of local authority archives in Ireland, and the bodies, including her own, which advocate for improvement. She suggested that historians and others who find difficulty in accessing records should also advocate for better resources.
Niamh Brennan, archivist with Donegal County Council, expanded on the theme of the poor resourcing of local authority archives and gave us insights into how she deals with requests to see sensitive records. Her picture of one person dealing with all aspects of an archives service was vivid and arresting. Dr Ciaran Casey, author of The Irish Department of Finance, 1959–1999, spoke of the difficulties of researching records of the department not transferred to the National Archives, and his worries about the conditions in which they are held. Maria Luddy, Professor Emerita, University of Warwick, spoke about difficulties in accessing local authority, prison and mental health records, and lack of consistency from services such as the HSE on the restrictions required by data protection legislation.
The afternoon session was devoted to records of, and records of inquiries into, industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, an issue that has bedevilled the rights of survivors to crucial identity and contextual information, and the rights of scholars to examine probably the most important cohort of restricted archives relating to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland (apart from the Land Commission archives). Dr Maeve O’Rourke, Clann Project and Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway, gave a paper on institutional records and the human rights implications of lack of access to them, with recommendations for legislation to remedy the situation.
Joy Carey and Wesley Geddis of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland gave a very useful presentation on the work they are doing to ingest and digitise the records of the religious orders that ran such institutions, as part of the Northern Ireland Truth Recovery Programme. This is a process from which the South has much to learn in terms of legislation to safeguard records, acquisition of actual or digital copies of those records, and serious focus on the needs of survivors.
Laura McGarrigle, assistant secretary, Adoption, Mother and Baby Homes and Research Division in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, spoke about archival preparations for the National Centre for Research and Remembrance at Seán McDermott Street, and gave us as much information as she could about the crucial issues surrounding this very important initiative.
The last speaker was, appropriately, Claire McGettrick, born Lorraine Hughes, adopted person and co-founder of the Clann Project, on ‘Archival Preservation of Survivor Testimony’, an issue particularly fraught since the poor treatment of affected people’s testimony by the Mother and Baby Home Commission.
There were short question-and-answer sessions at the end of the morning and afternoon programmes, and we were sorry that it was impossible to allocate more time to that. The symposium had a capacity audience, indicating the depth of interest in the subject.
The main take-aways are:
- Records that should be but owing to space constraints have not been transferred to the National Archives need to be protected in their current environments to prevent loss or damage; records in archival repositories that are closed need to be re-evaluated.
- The interpretation of data protection legislation, including GDPR, needs to be consistent and as user-friendly as possible across public archive services.
- Legislation to protect institutional and family separation records still in the custody of religious orders needs to be urgently passed, using the Northern Ireland model.
- Affected people must be better represented on the steering committee for the Centre for Research and Remembrance (it is very welcome that Patricia Carey, Advocate for Survivors and a survivor herself, has been appointed to the committee, but one person is not enough; Northern Ireland has three affected people on its independent panel of investigation).
We hope to have a follow-up symposium in a year to evaluate progress. We will also be producing a document with questions and recommendations arising from this one.
Catriona Crowe is a former Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland.