Another year, another anniversary. Ireland has been remembering the fateful years at the beginning of the 20th century in a programme of commemorations called the Decade of Centenaries, which has retold the country’s past through the significant events that took place from 1912 to 1922. This period was one of the most eventful in Ireland’s history, from the campaign for home rule to world war one, through to the Easter Rising in 1916 and the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Museums, galleries and libraries are among the venues that have been holding exhibitions, events, talks and conferences – all designed to gain a greater understanding of the roots of today’s divided society.
But 2018 will see a more controversial anniversary – 50 years since the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In October 1968, the police used batons and water cannons to break up a civil rights march in Derry, sparking off nearly five decades of conflict.
A number projects are commemorating this anniversary and it is hoped that they will use the past to promote reconciliation between the unionist and nationalist communities of Northern Ireland.
Speeches, Strikes and Struggles at the Tower Museum in Derry is funded by a £96,462 grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, which is administered by the Museums Association. The project has been introducing Protestant and Catholic communities to three remarkable collections: material gathered by civil rights activist Bridget Bond, which relates strongly to the Northern Ireland civil rights movement, particularly in Derry; items collected by trade unionist Gerry Lynch that document the trade union and labour movements of the city; and the 40,000 items amassed by the architect Peter Moloney, who was born in the Republic of Ireland and raised in London. Moloney’s wide-ranging collection, which includes 14,000 images of murals, covers the history of significant events in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Taken together, the collections, which are available to view online, form a detailed social history of the city’s journey through the Troubles and many other events. They include thousands of pamphlets, letters, magazines and booklets, handwritten notes, posters, postcards, badges and T-shirts. Moloney’s collection, gathered since his teenage years (he is now in his 60s), also features more than 12,000 photographs of murals, political banners and people at marches covering a wide variety of subjects.
Emma McGarrity, the learning and engagement officer at the Tower Museum, says many of the items had never been seen by the public but sparked a flood of memories at workshops, which have been an integral part of the project. The initiative also involves Libraries Northern Ireland, Ulster University and the independently run Museum of Free Derry.
“People in the workshops were wary at first but once they started reading the material and looking at the images, all their shared experiences started to emerge,” McGarrity says. “They realised how much of the past they had in common.”
The workshops have been so successful that oral recordings from the groups will feature in a series of temporary exhibitions in the next phase of Speeches, Strikes and Struggles, which begins in October 2018.
Rare resources
A private collection also lies at the heart of a new project in Belfast, launched by the BBC journalist Kate Adie in January. Divided Society is a digitised collection of more than 500 periodical titles relating to the conflict and peace process that were published between 1990 and 1998 in the UK, Ireland and further afield. It is held at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast’s oldest library. The publications come from community and voluntary organisations, political parties, pressure groups, local and national government bodies, and paramilitaries. More than 800 political posters have also been digitised.
Divided Society also incorporates an intergenerational reminiscence project that involved community groups discussing the conflict alongside students from schools and universities. Audio recordings from these are available on the website, as are education toolkits for schools. Two exhibitions, on personal stories and political cartoons of the period, are available to exhibit in other spaces. The £400,000 project has been backed by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, local charities and the government of the Irish Republic.
The Divided Society digital archive features a fraction of the 350,000 items held in the Linen Hall Library’s Northern Ireland Political Collection (NIPC). It is the only collection of its kind in the world as no other institution in a localised conflict has systematically gathered material from all sides since the beginning. The collection began in 1968 when the then librarian of Linen Hall, Jimmy Vitty, was handed a civil rights leaflet in a bar in Belfast’s city centre.
Over the years, the library has become the repository for a huge number of books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, manifestos, press releases, newspapers, objects and periodicals. It even includes leaflets smuggled inside Christmas cards from prisoners and politically branded children’s bibs.
Gavin Carville, the project manager for Divided Society, says the Linen Hall Library chose to digitise items from 1990s for the initiative because not much of the material was available elsewhere. “This was the pre-internet period and we didn’t get around to printing it on microfiche, as we did with much of our earlier materials.”
The library eventually wants to digitise its entire collection. “The NIPC is a special resource and we want to secure its future,” Carville says. “When the dust settles on this project, we hope to get support for further schemes similar to this.”
Individual contributions
The future is also exercising the minds of those in charge of another extraordinary collection of political ephemera in Northern Ireland. The Conflict Archive on the Internet (Cain), a web-based scheme run by the International Conflict Research Institute, has 98,000 items and has attracted more than 21 million visits and 78 million page views since it was set up in 1997 at Ulster University’s Magee campus in Derry. Martin Melaugh, the director of Cain, says there has been huge academic and public interest in the Ulster conflict since its early days.
“But we were aware that the further away people are from Northern Ireland – say, at university in Europe or the US – the less likely they are to have access to a wide range of physical materials related to the conflict on their shelves,” Melaugh says. “We wanted to ensure that people could study the conflict remotely, and providing free access via the internet was the way to go.”
A grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee, which supports higher education and research, and was at the time interested in the possibilities of what was then called the world wide web, was enough to get the project up and running. But there was another important reason for setting up an online archive.
“The most recent period of Troubles (from 1968 onwards) was not the first major conflict in Northern Ireland. There were serious Troubles in Belfast in the early 1920s,” Melaugh says. “By compiling the resources on Cain we hope, in a small way, to assist the efforts to avoid another period of conflict in the future.”
The content includes material written and edited by members of the Cain team and articles contributed specially for the project. There are also bibliographical databases, a chronology of political events in Northern Ireland, including a unique database of all those people killed as a result of the Troubles, as well as photographs, maps, posters, murals, films and television programmes. Material is still being added, with recent projects including Accounts of the Conflict, a two-year series collecting oral histories, and, most recently, a directory of Northern Ireland’s political murals.
Since its inception, the archive has been free to use and Melaugh has kept it going by appealing to a wide range of funders, including Ulster University, to pay the £100,000 annual running costs. But he is now in discussions to move Cain to the university library to secure its long-term future.
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Troubles,” Melaugh says. “We hope that the digital collection can be preserved for the long term so that in 50 years’ time, when we are no longer around, there will still be a collection that people can use.”
There are other collections related to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 by a group of local photographers who wanted to challenge the media representation of the city’s experience of conflict. The gallery holds a substantial archive in trust for the community. This has been compiled over the past through contributions from professional and amateur photographers, and records political, cultural and social change in Northern Ireland.
The Arts Council for Northern Ireland, in conjunction with Ulster Museum, also has a web-based archive reflecting how artists from a variety of art forms, including visual art, literature, drama, film, radio and TV and music, have reacted to the conflict in Ulster.
What is remarkable about this collecting is that so much has been done by individuals. The normal state institutions responsible for collecting have tended to avoid this sphere, although this is changing. But the former Linen Hall librarian John Gray says that the authorities left the library alone, despite much of the material it collected being seditious and some of it illegal under the draconian anti-terrorist legislation of the time. The library has also been a target for paramilitary attacks and bomb threats.
Carville pays tribute to his predecessors, whose efforts mean projects such as Divided Society are possible. “There was so much unofficial material being produced at the time,” he says. “It could all have easily disappeared. It was imperative that someone was collecting it and did not need official permission to do so.”
Patrick Kelly is a freelance writer.
The Museums Association Conference & Exhibition in Belfast, 8-10 November, will include sessions on how museums, galleries and heritage sites have been interpreting the Decade of Centenaries, the Troubles and world war one
But 2018 will see a more controversial anniversary – 50 years since the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In October 1968, the police used batons and water cannons to break up a civil rights march in Derry, sparking off nearly five decades of conflict.
A number projects are commemorating this anniversary and it is hoped that they will use the past to promote reconciliation between the unionist and nationalist communities of Northern Ireland.
Speeches, Strikes and Struggles at the Tower Museum in Derry is funded by a £96,462 grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, which is administered by the Museums Association. The project has been introducing Protestant and Catholic communities to three remarkable collections: material gathered by civil rights activist Bridget Bond, which relates strongly to the Northern Ireland civil rights movement, particularly in Derry; items collected by trade unionist Gerry Lynch that document the trade union and labour movements of the city; and the 40,000 items amassed by the architect Peter Moloney, who was born in the Republic of Ireland and raised in London. Moloney’s wide-ranging collection, which includes 14,000 images of murals, covers the history of significant events in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Taken together, the collections, which are available to view online, form a detailed social history of the city’s journey through the Troubles and many other events. They include thousands of pamphlets, letters, magazines and booklets, handwritten notes, posters, postcards, badges and T-shirts. Moloney’s collection, gathered since his teenage years (he is now in his 60s), also features more than 12,000 photographs of murals, political banners and people at marches covering a wide variety of subjects.
Emma McGarrity, the learning and engagement officer at the Tower Museum, says many of the items had never been seen by the public but sparked a flood of memories at workshops, which have been an integral part of the project. The initiative also involves Libraries Northern Ireland, Ulster University and the independently run Museum of Free Derry.
“People in the workshops were wary at first but once they started reading the material and looking at the images, all their shared experiences started to emerge,” McGarrity says. “They realised how much of the past they had in common.”
The workshops have been so successful that oral recordings from the groups will feature in a series of temporary exhibitions in the next phase of Speeches, Strikes and Struggles, which begins in October 2018.
Rare resources
A private collection also lies at the heart of a new project in Belfast, launched by the BBC journalist Kate Adie in January. Divided Society is a digitised collection of more than 500 periodical titles relating to the conflict and peace process that were published between 1990 and 1998 in the UK, Ireland and further afield. It is held at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast’s oldest library. The publications come from community and voluntary organisations, political parties, pressure groups, local and national government bodies, and paramilitaries. More than 800 political posters have also been digitised.
Divided Society also incorporates an intergenerational reminiscence project that involved community groups discussing the conflict alongside students from schools and universities. Audio recordings from these are available on the website, as are education toolkits for schools. Two exhibitions, on personal stories and political cartoons of the period, are available to exhibit in other spaces. The £400,000 project has been backed by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, local charities and the government of the Irish Republic.
The Divided Society digital archive features a fraction of the 350,000 items held in the Linen Hall Library’s Northern Ireland Political Collection (NIPC). It is the only collection of its kind in the world as no other institution in a localised conflict has systematically gathered material from all sides since the beginning. The collection began in 1968 when the then librarian of Linen Hall, Jimmy Vitty, was handed a civil rights leaflet in a bar in Belfast’s city centre.
Over the years, the library has become the repository for a huge number of books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, manifestos, press releases, newspapers, objects and periodicals. It even includes leaflets smuggled inside Christmas cards from prisoners and politically branded children’s bibs.
Gavin Carville, the project manager for Divided Society, says the Linen Hall Library chose to digitise items from 1990s for the initiative because not much of the material was available elsewhere. “This was the pre-internet period and we didn’t get around to printing it on microfiche, as we did with much of our earlier materials.”
The library eventually wants to digitise its entire collection. “The NIPC is a special resource and we want to secure its future,” Carville says. “When the dust settles on this project, we hope to get support for further schemes similar to this.”
Individual contributions
The future is also exercising the minds of those in charge of another extraordinary collection of political ephemera in Northern Ireland. The Conflict Archive on the Internet (Cain), a web-based scheme run by the International Conflict Research Institute, has 98,000 items and has attracted more than 21 million visits and 78 million page views since it was set up in 1997 at Ulster University’s Magee campus in Derry. Martin Melaugh, the director of Cain, says there has been huge academic and public interest in the Ulster conflict since its early days.
“But we were aware that the further away people are from Northern Ireland – say, at university in Europe or the US – the less likely they are to have access to a wide range of physical materials related to the conflict on their shelves,” Melaugh says. “We wanted to ensure that people could study the conflict remotely, and providing free access via the internet was the way to go.”
A grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee, which supports higher education and research, and was at the time interested in the possibilities of what was then called the world wide web, was enough to get the project up and running. But there was another important reason for setting up an online archive.
“The most recent period of Troubles (from 1968 onwards) was not the first major conflict in Northern Ireland. There were serious Troubles in Belfast in the early 1920s,” Melaugh says. “By compiling the resources on Cain we hope, in a small way, to assist the efforts to avoid another period of conflict in the future.”
The content includes material written and edited by members of the Cain team and articles contributed specially for the project. There are also bibliographical databases, a chronology of political events in Northern Ireland, including a unique database of all those people killed as a result of the Troubles, as well as photographs, maps, posters, murals, films and television programmes. Material is still being added, with recent projects including Accounts of the Conflict, a two-year series collecting oral histories, and, most recently, a directory of Northern Ireland’s political murals.
Since its inception, the archive has been free to use and Melaugh has kept it going by appealing to a wide range of funders, including Ulster University, to pay the £100,000 annual running costs. But he is now in discussions to move Cain to the university library to secure its long-term future.
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Troubles,” Melaugh says. “We hope that the digital collection can be preserved for the long term so that in 50 years’ time, when we are no longer around, there will still be a collection that people can use.”
There are other collections related to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 by a group of local photographers who wanted to challenge the media representation of the city’s experience of conflict. The gallery holds a substantial archive in trust for the community. This has been compiled over the past through contributions from professional and amateur photographers, and records political, cultural and social change in Northern Ireland.
The Arts Council for Northern Ireland, in conjunction with Ulster Museum, also has a web-based archive reflecting how artists from a variety of art forms, including visual art, literature, drama, film, radio and TV and music, have reacted to the conflict in Ulster.
What is remarkable about this collecting is that so much has been done by individuals. The normal state institutions responsible for collecting have tended to avoid this sphere, although this is changing. But the former Linen Hall librarian John Gray says that the authorities left the library alone, despite much of the material it collected being seditious and some of it illegal under the draconian anti-terrorist legislation of the time. The library has also been a target for paramilitary attacks and bomb threats.
Carville pays tribute to his predecessors, whose efforts mean projects such as Divided Society are possible. “There was so much unofficial material being produced at the time,” he says. “It could all have easily disappeared. It was imperative that someone was collecting it and did not need official permission to do so.”
Patrick Kelly is a freelance writer.
The Museums Association Conference & Exhibition in Belfast, 8-10 November, will include sessions on how museums, galleries and heritage sites have been interpreting the Decade of Centenaries, the Troubles and world war one