The National Library has acquired a 5,000-item collection of Seβn O'Casey's papers, formerly owned by the playwright's family. Accepting the archive on behalf of the State last night, the Taoiseach said it was a "great national treasure" returning to the city of O'Casey's birth.
The Educational Building Society paid £250,000 sterling for the collection, before donating it under a scheme which allows tax credits on purchases of such gifts for the State. The papers were catalogued by the playwright's daughter, Ms Shivaun O'Casey, after her mother's death in 1995.
The director of the National Library, Mr Brendan O'Donoghue, praised the family for choosing Ireland for the archive, when they "could have profited by disposing of it elsewhere", especially in the US. Ms O'Casey said she was "very pleased" the papers had come here. Speaking before the formal handover, she said it had been "strange" to read all her father's correspondence when she did: "I was 60 when I was going through it, and he was 60 when he had me."
Mr O'Donoghue described the gift as another step towards ending the "haemorrhage" of Irish literary papers, which had "gone on too long". The library already held major collections from writers such as Yeats, Joyce and Shaw, he added, but O'Casey was "hardly represented" until now: "The important new information which the archive provides will enable scholars to reappraise fundamentally the contribution of this illustrious Dublin writer, not only to Irish but to world literature."
The material comprises 44 boxes of correspondence, as well as a separate catalogue of letters between Seβn and Eileen O'Casey, and a diary the playwright wrote after the death from leukaemia of their 21-year-old son, Niall, in 1957.
Ms O'Casey said the diary was particularly striking in that the writing was "unbroken, as though it just flowed out". She added: "Niall and Seβn were very close. He was the political child and politics was always Seβn's main interest. He was a politician who couldn't help being a writer."
The correspondence is categorised under such headings as "religion", "politics" and "the Abbey Theatre". One box is devoted to letters to and from the labour rights activist, Jim Larkin.
