The mention of the Gormanston Register which, the Minister tells us, the National Library is to acquire, brings a certain analogous matter to my mind. First of all, I congratulate the Minister on enabling the Library to acquire this manuscript because these kinds of family documents are very liable to be lost and they constitute a very important part of the social history of our country. I think a great many similar documents are in imminent peril of being lost.
I remember salvaging a box of documents in a country house in Ireland, which the Library subsequently acquired, which made a very real contribution to a strange part of the history of this country, of which I had personal knowledge. If the papers had not been found and finally deposited with the National Library, that side of the story might have perished altogether, the story of a landlord. I remember people saying, when I was young, that their grandfathers had knelt down and thanked God the day he was murdered for that he was the worst man who had ever walked the world. Yet, when that box of documents was opened, an entirely different version of his life was told.
Looking back on those days, I have very little doubt now that he was a very good man who was anxious to do what was right by his people, but, as good people often are, he was wholly misunderstood, cruelly misrepresented and finally murdered. That is a story into which I do not propose to go now. Still, these old family documents constitute a very vital and essential part of the social history of our people. Here is the point I want to make today. I believe that in the files of the Land Commission there is an immense mass of documents relating to the old estates they took over under the first Land Act and all the way down since the eighties. They have never been catalogued. I do not believe anybody knows what is in them.
We are all conscious of the perennial outbursts of activity that take place in Government Departments when somebody takes it into his head to clean up the place. The files become too numerous, accommodation is overcrowded and suddenly an heroic decision is taken that everything more than 20 years old is junk. The Land Commission have shown a very prudent reluctance to do that for which they have sometimes been criticised. I think they were wise and right to have held their records as long as they have. I do not know how far back they have held them but I think the National Library ought to collaborate with the Land Commission to get these documents catalogued and either preserved or at least microfilmed so that a complete record of them can be kept.
I imagine it is almost true to say that practically every acre of land in Ireland has at some time or other passed through the hands of the Land Commission since we bought the last of the landlords out under the 1923 and subsequent Land Acts. A record of that ought to be preserved and of all that went before that, most of which is history contained in the rent books and the records of the old estates. I had a certain interest, not because of any family connection but because we happened to be tenants of it, in the Dillon Estate in the West of Ireland which, as some Deputies in the West know, stretches from Castlerea to Charlestown.
The papers of that estate have been lost to us. They were taken to Ditchley and I pursued them there and hoped to get them for the National Library and then I found that through some subsequent will, they had been left to some obscure museum in Portsmouth or Plymouth. I imagine the title they have acquired to them is of such kind that it is highly unlikely they will ever be recovered to this country. They relate exclusively to land and homes in Roscommon and Mayo and it seems odd that they should have found their ultimate resting place in Portsmouth or Plymouth, where nobody can have the slightest interest in them but whither any scholar who wants to consult them must go. I suggest that in cases like that the National Library should be facilitated to microfilm such documents and bring back the record for installation here.
The next point I want to make is that I believe there is a mass of material in the Land Commission at the present time which should be catalogued and either preserved or microfilmed for the records of the National Library. The trouble about this sort of proposition is that very few people give a damn and the great danger is that because there is no proper preservation of that record, just through the process of inertia, nobody does anything about it. The Minister for Education is a young and zealous person and he should be concerned for the social history of Ireland. It is a thing a great many people ignore and are not interested in but it is the very fabric of the lives of our people and one of the few good things the landlords left, these exhaustive records. We should not be such fools as to suffer these treasures to perish simply because we associate them with a source of which we have bitter memories.
The other point I want to mention is that the Catholic Workers' College needs Government help. It should be given that help but I cannot help registering a note of regret. I always regret when I see a voluntary undertaking which has been carrying on under its own steam successfully having to fall into the category of the multitude of enterprises which have become partially, if not wholly, dependent on Government aid. I should have thought that the Catholic Workers' College here could have looked to the trade unions and to the business establishments of the country for such modest funds as they require.
