THE passing of the National Archives Act in 1986 was probably one of the least noticed happenings of that year but for Irish historians it was as if they had been led into Shangri La after years of frustration staring at the mountains of officialdom which blocked access to the real history of this State. For 64 years the official records of all the Government departments remained secret while most other democracies had gradually moved to the 30 year rule which the Archives Act has now introduced here.
In 1975, when I wrote a book about Irish neutrality during the second World War, much of the information had to come from the British records. Even if the diplomatic telegrams of the British Representative, Sir John Maffey, threw a hitherto unknown light on the story behind neutrality, it was inexplicable that successive administrations wanted to hide the Irish version from the world as if they were ashamed of it.
Dr Garret FitzGerald may be blamed for letting the national debt double under his term as Taoiseach, but not just historians will be forever in his debt for responding to the urgings to unlock our official records by putting through the Archives Act. It is thanks to this action that the recent records of children sent to the United States for adoption could be traced in the National Archives.
Prof Dermot Keogh of UCC has created a well deserved reputation for mining the newly opened archives for his accounts of Irish diplomatic history and Church State relations. But he has now founded this Journal of History and Society to be a constant reminder of the valuable information now available in the National Archives in Bishop Street in Dublin. They provide the opportunity "to revolutionise" and "reclaim the lost history of the Irish State", he says in his introduction to the first issue, which is devoted to the theme of freedom of information. He points out that the importance of this opportunity has been "all too slowly realised in professional circles" and is also critical of a "bias" among academies against the writing of "contemporary" history.
Keogh's own contribution to this issue is a lengthy treatment of the culture of official secrecy and book censorship between 1922 and 1961.
He reproduces a letter in 1935 from Sean O'Faolain to the Chief Censor's Office asking for permission to import several copies of his banned book Midsummer Night Madness "as neither I nor my wife possess a copy.
Another censorship document he retrieves from the files deals with the banning of books by Graham Greene. Following the banning of The End of the Affair in 1951 (Greene's fifth banning), an official in the Department of Justice, Dan Costigan, was moved to write to the Secretary arguing against the severity of the sensorship. Costigan pointed out that even the Committee on Evil Literature, on which the Censorship Act was based, did not recommend that the test should be whether a book "might have a bad influence on an adolescent".
Greene's book had received the US "Catholic Literary Award", but Costigan wrote that judged by the standards which the Censorship Board have set themselves, The End of the Affair does not stand a chance". A big percentage of Irish young people emigrate but "bringing them up in a hothouse atmosphere may not be the best preparation for their life in Britain and America", the civil servant argued privately, of course.
Other essays by 14 contributors deal with such aspects as secrecy in Dail Eireann, the need for the Freedom of Information Act now becoming law, how the concept operates abroad and in the European Parliament, the lack of information in the education system, why is the Irish citizen so deprived and corporate secrecy.
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