The Irish Land Commission Archive

Tonight's episode of The History Show is a programme given over to a field trip, to an industrial estate in County Laois - leading to a journey through some of the most precious documents ever likely to be vested in the Irish state.

Many of our regular listeners may remember a History Show from October 2023, in which we highlighted the relative inaccessibility to the public and to scholars of the last great untapped archive of Irish social history - the records of the Land Commission, founded in 1881 and revamped on the creation of the Irish Free State in 1923.

The archive contains up to 11 million documents in 23,000 boxes, material of potentially untold value to historians and genealogists, that is currently stored in two facilities in Sandyford and Port Laoise in the care of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

On that October programme we heard from, among others, historian Prof. Terence Dooley, genealogist Fiona Fitzsimons and archivist Catriona Crowe. We begin with a quick recap of what they said back then, on the difficulty of gaining access to the vast archive of the Irish Land Commission.

This organisation was initially responsible for the movement of farms from Irish landlords to their former tenants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then concerned itself, from the 1920s, with the redistribution of farmland throughout the country until it was finally dissolved, its work deemed to have been completed, in 1999.

On that October programme, we didn't hear from the Department of Agriculture. That was because The History Show had been promised a visit to the facility and a tour of the archive. That took place in January. Apparently our programme had not gone entirely unnoticed in the upper echelons of the Department, nonetheless we received a very warm welcome and some positive news.

In his visit to Portlaoise, Myles speaks to the following guests:

John Kinsella, head of Legal Services at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, who has policy and operational responsibility for the Irish Land Commission, including its records.

Mick Boylan, Assistant Principal Officer in Records Branch, and the Keeper of Records in Portlaoise.

Tommy Heffernan, who works in the Records Branch and is the longest-serving employee in the archive.