Sir, – Diarmaid Ferriter (Opinion, October 22nd) has already made the scholarly case against establishing a standalone Mary Robinson presidential library in Ballina.
Historians are well aware that standalone one-person archives don’t attract much traffic, particularly when remote from related collections.
That case is strengthened by Mayo County Council’s absolute failure as custodians of the Jackie Clarke collection of Irish republican records, which are housed just a few hundred yards away from the proposed Mary Robinson Centre.
The Jackie Clarke collection is unique: a committed republican and a determined collector, he was able to secure records and ephemera from groups and individuals across the world who would never have given anything to State institutions.
If the Mary Robinson collection – which I note does not currently include her personal diaries from 1991 to 1998, the years of her single presidential term – is valued at €2.5 million, then the Jackie Clarke collection must be worth 10-times that.
A very fine building has been refurbished and opened to the public for the Clarke collection. But beyond a handful of items on display, the council has done almost nothing to make the Jackie Clarke collection accessible for research.
Instead almost all of this absolutely crucial and invaluable collection sits securely stored behind the scenes, most of it still uncataloged and all of it unavailable to researchers, in the archival equivalent of a time capsule.
Is this to be Mayo’s most telling and enduring contribution to the decade of centenaries?
– Yours, etc,
EUNAN O’HALPIN
Trinity College Dublin