Archive

Irish Railway Record Society

Irish Transport Archives and the Irish Railway Record Society

Joseph Leckey

Transport archives are those records created by a transport company and by its constituent companies, and the company is required to preserve certain records - the "statutory records" - under the Companies Clauses Consolidation Act of 1845 and its amending Acts. The company also preserves non-statutory records for administrative purposes. The company secretary is the officer ultimately responsible for the confidentiality and the preservation of the archives, but the management and conservation of the records, and the selection of those non-statutory records to be preserved indefinitely, are normally the concern of the archivist.

Access to transport archives is desired by two groups of users: officers of the company in the course of their duties, and non-company users, including students, historians and journalists. There is inherent conflict between the needs of these two groups of users. The officers of the company understand the material relevant to their department, and its preservation is in their collective interest: non-company users are rarely aware of the limitations of the records; need guidance as to the relevance and content of the record classes that exist; and need searchroom facilities to study the material, with all the attendant costs of supervision, paper-keeping, and retrieval.

In the 1960s the Ulster Transport Authority, British Railways, and Córas Iompair Éireann all faced growing demand for access by non-company users, and this demand co-incided with the beginning of the office-property boom and the resulting pressure to release real property by getting rid of old papers. To these demands, both for access and that they jettison archives, the three companies responded differently. The UTA handed its archives to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland: BR developed its own searchroom at Porchester Road, although it later followed UTA policy, and handed its archives to the PRO at Kew; and CIÉ appointed a consultant archivist, and developed a symbiotic relationship with the Irish Railway Record Society, the membership of which included the great majority of the non-company users of the company’s archives. This paper compares these three different policies, which operated, broadly, in Northern Ireland, in Great Britain, and in the Republic of Ireland.