Rare film footage of the 1916 Rising and other historic Irish events has sold for £95,000 at an auction in Dublin this afternoon. Whyte's auctioneers would only say that the buyer was a private collector based in Ireland. The archive was compiled by a private collector whose heir decided to sell the material. The newsreel includes unique footage of a wedding attended by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins shortly before their deaths. It covers nearly half a century from the 1916 Rising to President John F Kennedy's visit to Ireland in 1963. The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Sile De Valera, said that most of the film material on auction is already held by the National Library. She added that they would receive a copy of material they did not possess.
