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On 13 June 2024, the Historical Studies Committee of the Royal Irish Academy held a one-day conference exploring questions of access to and preservation (including digital preservation) of Irish historical records and archives. Dr Maeve O’Rourke, a member of the Royal Irish Academy’s Young Academy Ireland, was a member of the conference organising committee. The event was supported by the Irish Centre for Human Rights and by Boston College, the ARINS Project, Justice for Magdalenes Research, the Irish Committee for Historical Sciences, and the Archives and Records Association.

Speakers included archivists, historians, civil servants from Ireland and Northern Ireland, and human rights experts. Access to the publicly and privately held records and archives of Ireland’s institutional and family separation abuses was the focus of one half of the day. The conference proceedings can be viewed here. A post-event report will be published later this year.

Dr Maeve O’Rourke gave an invited lecture entitled ‘Institutional archives and human rights implications of lack of access to them’. Her presentation not only addressed current barriers to information access; it also explored the international and European human rights law, and EU GDPR, norms that should underpin the management of historical abuse information and the future operations of the National Centre for Research and Remembrance at Sean McDermott Street in Dublin 1. Dr O’Rourke’s lecture was covered by Fintan O’Toole, ‘Failure to prevent destruction of records is a further insult to those whose identities were stolen’ The Irish Times (18 June 2024).