The detail in some of the files is striking, including inspectors’ reports commenting on the abilities and prospects of various tenants and their families. Preparing for this work, officials have held talks with the National Archives, the National Library, the Department of Defence and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. Digitising the search aids is “much more manageable and realistic” at this point than setting out to cover the entire collection, it says. With that in mind, the department describes the initiative as a “responsible first step” to preserve the value of the entire collection. “There’s a lot in the search aids but they are the key to these documents and without these you’d just be opening boxes at random.” “There’s probably not a piece of rural land in the country that isn’t referenced somewhere in these boxes,” Gallagher says. Still, the initial scope of the project is modest compared to the vast volume of material stored in two floors in the Portlaoise warehouse. “It is vital to ensure that the information in these search aids is preserved for future generations as without it the records will become unsearchable.” Portlaoise warehouse The Department of Agriculture says the guide files, many decades old, show “visible signs” of wear and tear because they are handled every day by officials. Without them, it would be impossible to find individual records. The search aids are in constant use because Land Commission records are a key reference source for lawyers dealing with property sales and questions over legal title and rights of way. Photograph: Bryan O’BrienĪfter considerable delay, there is some urgency. The project will be a long one but I am really enthused by it and I know it will stand the test of time.”Ĭonor Gallagher of the Land Commission with some of the boxes of files. “It is incumbent on us to ensure that we protect and preserve these amazing pieces of history but that we also ensure that they are as accessible as possible. “The digitising of the Land Commission records will be one of the great bodies of work of its kind ever carried out in the history of the State,” says the Minister. McConalogue has set aside up to €200,000 to start the project in 2022, but expects it will take several years to complete. They are a critical guide for finding individual documents among the 35,000 separate sets of records, some of which comprise dozens of boxes, in the maze-like archive. The search aids are made up of thousands of pages on court approvals for land purchase agreements, loan advances and repayments, and migrant books detailing how people moved from one area to another to take up land. Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue has backed moves to digitise some 200 “search aids” in anticipation of making them available online in the same way as old census records and the military pensions archive from the 1916 Rising to the Civil War. Now tentative steps are being taken to start opening at least some of the Land Commission files. Just a few of the many millions of documents from the archive. “This is a repository of historical knowledge and its exploration is fundamental to the telling of the story of modern Ireland.” “People have asked for this for decade after decade,” Rouse says, adding that the lack of access leads to a “huge absence” from the account of past events. To know the papers are there but remain beyond their immediate grasp has long been a source of rancour for academics. “The social vision that was wrapped around the political revolution was rooted in the construction of a small farming country of prospering rural homesteads.” Shielded from viewīut the Land Commission collection has long been shielded from public view, off bounds for historians, accessible only rarely to researchers and the subject of persistent demands for transparency. “Almost all aspects of the history of modern Ireland will be in some way touched upon by these documents,” says Paul Rouse, professor of history at UCD. “We’re acutely aware that this stuff is priceless and irreplaceable.”įor historians, this is akin to treasure. They include “a record of almost every piece of land in the State” and the people working on it. “We have somewhere between eight million and 12 million records, the detail is phenomenal,” says Gallagher, keeper of the Land Commission files and legal adviser at the Department of Agriculture, which controls them. With rural land ownership central to the nationalist project, they also cover the push after independence to create a new social order with farming at its heart. Photograph: Bryan O’BrienĪll of this constituted a massive transfer of wealth from an elite class of property holders to ordinary people. Some of the records in the commission’s archive show their age.
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