As Dublin city was engulfed by Civil War fighting exactly 100 years ago, some were focused not just on loss of life and limb but the consequences of the Four Courts explosion which destroyed the contents of the Public Records Office (PRO), housed in the courts complex.
The explosion was heard 15 miles away. Winston Churchill, secretary of state for the colonies, wrote to Michael Collins: “The archives of the Four Courts may be scattered, but the title deeds of Ireland are safe.” No doubt Churchill enjoyed composing this poetic bon mot but he was wide of the mark; the archival documents were more incinerated than scattered, though some of the documents did fly high and wide, as described by Ernie O’Malley, one of the Four Courts occupants: “Pieces of white paper gyrated in the upper air like seagulls ... the fire was fascinating to watch”.
It is not a line that endeared O’Malley to the archivists who for decades rued the losses and the large scale of heritage destruction, covering collections dating back to the 12th century; in effect, what would have become the national archives of the new state. The extent of the loss included the irreplaceable Irish censuses of 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851. Those who in recent years have accessed the digitised returns of the 1901 and 1911 censuses will fully appreciate the significance of the loss of those 19th-century records and the direct, physical link to our ancestors. On July 1st, 1922, The Irish Times referred to the fire as a disaster that had “torn whole chapters out of Irish history”, the work of those the Gaelic languages scholar Thomas O’Rahilly described as “unpatriotic vandals”.
Constantine Curran, as clerk of the courts, had reminded both sides of the Treaty divide of the uniqueness of the archival documents; arriving at the Four Courts before the fighting, he was taken to see Rory O’Connor, one of the senior IRA occupiers. Curran warned him about the inexcusability of damaging the holdings, but “left without receiving a satisfactory reply” and subsequently showed courage in the aftermath of the explosion to do a survey when the scene was still live and dangerous. His account, sent to the new Irish attorney general, Hugh Kennedy, made for bleak reading: “Nothing is recoverable ... in complete ruin.” The Royal Society of Antiquaries appealed for scattered papers “however fragmentary or damaged”, to be returned.
Carnage
That plea was more in hope than anticipation. But the carnage did prompt other initiatives and some effort to act on the urging of poet WB Yeats “to build up again the idealism of Ireland ... of national scholarship”. Amid the bitterness of the Civil War’s aftermath, historian and former Free State minister Eoin MacNeill demanded something “lasting and fruitful and potent for Irish learning”, and he and sympathetic professors, civil servants and administrators crossed religious and political divides to make that happen through the establishment of the Irish Manuscripts Commission (IMC) in 1928.
It became the main Irish publisher of historical source material, partly through locating copies or transcripts of some of the original PRO documents. The IMC survived against the odds, in the face of hostility and parsimoniousness from some in the Department of Finance who thought the infant State could ill afford what they regarded as a luxurious and indulgent focus on heritage. At least both WT Cosgrave and Eamon de Valera could agree on the importance of the IMC’s work, and it was due in no small part to the IMC that Irish history continued to be written through the analysis of primary sources. The IMC also had to continue to remind the State of its ongoing responsibility to preserve its own records at national and local level.
In 2000, a row played out in this newspaper over responsibility for the destruction of the PRO with Tom Garvin arguing it was “engineered” by the IRA “knowingly and with malicious intent”, after they had been apprised of the preciousness of the material. Eoin Neeson riposted “one must ask if the Provisional Government and its forces ... who shelled the Four Courts were also apprised” of the contents before the shelling?
Perhaps it is a measure of increased cultural maturity that for the 100th anniversary, the focus is instead on the State-funded project to continue to replicate the lost archive as much as possible through the Beyond 2022 project, an all-island and international collaborative research endeavour to create a virtual reconstruction of the contents of the 1922 PRO: the Virtual Treasury of Ireland, now freely and permanently available online. This has involved millions of words being “linked and reassembled from copies, transcripts and other records scattered among the collections” of numerous archives, including as far away as Australia. It also includes “an immersive 3-D reconstruction” of the destroyed building.
It will make for a more satisfying experience than the blame game.