Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
(Instrumental)
Well the Treaty is probably one of the most significant documents we hold in the
National Archives and it certainly is a very significant Irish administrative
document as well.
It was, of course, the Treaty as negotiated between the British and Irish
in London in 1921 and resulted ultimately in the
independent state of Ireland being established.
The 1921 Treaty was essentially a working document.
That's how the people who were in the negotiations viewed it at the time,
that's how the office viewed it at the time
and therefore it wasn't given a huge fanfare.
And you can tell originally that it was a discussion document because
it's headed “Proposed Draft Articles of Agreement”, but the minute it was agreed,
they just took the document and struck through the word “proposed” and that was
the document as agreed. There's also one of the pages where obviously
they needed a spare piece of paper and tore a piece off the bottom of one of the pages.
It's a document which was produced by a government department and office,
and it's printed on machine-made paper from the early turn of the 20th century.
It's been typed on and then the only additions to it are the signatures at the end.
Those were probably the most interesting but also from a conservation
point of view, the most problematic element of the document.
Having been signed, the Irish copy was returned to Ireland
There would have been a British copy as well which would have gone and been
filed in the British Archives, but the Irish copy
came back to Ireland and went to what was then the Department of the President
of the Executive Council which was later the Department of the Taoiseach.
So essentially the President of the Executive Council was the prime minister of the day and
of course that's now the Taoiseach.
And the document went into an envelope that was sealed closed and
remained in the Taoiseach's Department for upwards of the next 80 years
until 2002, when I was doing a routine survey of rooms within Government Buildings
to see which records were lagging in terms of their transfer and
came across a whole collection of what are called their “State Documents”.
On looking through them I realised that the very first State Document that was
ever filed belonging to the Irish State was the Treaty, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
As a standard government document, the Treaty was stapled together
with 5 staples along the left-hand margin.
Over the past 90 years, those obviously oxidised and they rusted and were causing problems,
deteriorating the paper immediately around them. The staples were removed and the holes that they
had left behind, I used those to incorporate a Japanese-style binding to the
document to keep all the loose pages together. I surface-cleaned each page
with a cotton swab and a grated eraser
and that just picked off the loose particles of dust and dirt.
Although the document itself is actually very clean. It had been kept sealed within an envelope
and hadn't been used or handled by readers over the years.
It was a closed document as we'd term it. And because it hadn't been
handled by the readers, there was very little wear and tear and damage.
There was very little light damage. The paper had aged
but it wasn't hugely damaged and is still in very good condition.
The digitisation of documents is very important
in relation to preservation
but also in relation to access by the public of very special documents
that they would never normally get to handle.
They would be able to get a much better close-up view given that
the dots per inch are so high, that the resolution is so high that they can get a
really good look at the document much better than they could ever do before.
The Treaty itself was interesting to scan in that it is such a special document.
We scanned it at 600 dots per inch and as TIFF files for each page.
It wasn't a very long document so we were able to take our time and
do a really nice job on it.
And you kind of feel like that you had better be very careful here not to,
well we're careful always but just to be really careful this time.
Because it was an important State document, obviously the Department
would keep it under lock and key.
It rested with similar documents such as foreign letters of credence,
that would come with diplomatic representatives when
they would arrive in Ireland or any other treaties or bilateral agreements
that we would make with other countries, so as such, it wasn't
placed on a routine office file because it was the only one of its kind
and signed and had an important legal significance.
We're all used to seeing treaties being signed by presidents of one country
and prime ministers of another.
It's normally done in a big press conference setting.
There's the special pens set out. Somehow you don't get that impression
from the way and the look of the Treaty that it was anything like
that on the day.
So you can see immediately when you examine the document
that it is not the most exciting looking document. It's more its significance in
terms of its place in Irish history.