STEVEN C. FFEARY-SMYRL,
Madam, - Charles Lysaght's article "When is an archive not the whole story?" (The Irish Times, January 9th) rightly praises Garret FitzGerald's personal involvement in getting the 1986 National Archives Act (NAA) on to the statute books. But like most parliamentary acts which set a new direction in public policy, it revealed shortcomings not many years after it was passed. Charles Lysaght has identified the NAA's lack of independent scrutiny when decisions are made not to transfer material to the National Archives.
In too many instances large bodies of material have not been made available to the public because the Government Departments concerned, without any statutory challenge, have been able to withhold material under the premise that it is in regular use and that parting with it would be to the detriment of the work or to the service provided by the Departments or agencies concerned.
As a reason for denying access to records, this surely has to be one of the weakest. Nevertheless, it has been used by the Department of Health and Children in relation to the records held by the General Register Office (which holds Ireland's civil registers of birth, death and marriage, some of which date back to 1845) since the issue of releasing them was first raised in the late 1980s.
What is most galling about this situation is that the GRO does not use the original hard copy registers in its day-to-day business (these are stored in Roscommon town). It works from a series of microfilm copies and has done for at least the past 25 years. If the NAA had provision for appeal against decisions to withhold material, then microfilm copies of Ireland's civil registration records, and of much other historical material, might long ago have been made more widely available throughout the island's national and local archives and library services.
The National Archives Advisory Council's report for 2001 highlighted the issue that independent review of decisions relating to release of records, included in the Freedom of Information Act, does not also extend to similar decisions made under the NAA. That present legislation allows for greater access to current records than to "historical" ones is nothing short of bizarre. - Yours, etc.,
STEVEN C. FFEARY-SMYRL, Honorary Secretary, Association of Professional Genealogists in Ireland, Templemore Avenue, Dublin 6.
... ... * ... * ... * ... ...
Madam, - My article in your edition of January 10th may have given the impression that no government records whatsoever were released before the National Archives Act, 1986 came into force.
In fact, thanks to the efforts of the Brendan Mac Giolla Coille, the Keeper of State Papers, and the headline set by Taoiseach Jack Lynch and more especially his successor Liam Cosgrave, Cabinet records and related papers had been released by the Department of the Taoiseach before this.
But this was done as a matter of grace and did not extend to departmental records, with which my article was primarily concerned. - Yours, etc.,
CHARLES LYSAGHT, Strand Road, Dublin 4.