History

Post Stonewall, Irish lesbian and gay groups and activists have laboured to document our history. Well-preserved yet incomplete records bear witness to the nascent lesbian and gay civil rights era of the early 1970s.

Organisations like the Northern Irish Gay Rights Association (NIGRA), Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) and the National Lesbian and Gay Federation (NLGF) maintained a tradition of preservation with keen consideration, often at considerable expense and with limited human resources. As one of the largest, oldest and continuous lesbian/gay corporate organisations on this island, NLGF has been to the forefront of maintaining some semblance of an archive. From the late ‘70s onwards this was confined to a rudimentary press clippings service and some limited research.

Like many corporations NLGF has also managed to acquire or subsume the interests and records of other smaller, often more specialised, groups. One example of this is the entire archive of Out, Ireland’s first commercial monthly gay magazine (1984-1988). The Out holding typically includes proofed manuscripts, original artwork, administrative and financial files, photographs, illustrations and file copies.

From 1980 onwards a larger group of people in NLGF helped maintain and preserve documents and cuttings. NLGF capitalised on years of acquisition by holding onto a huge number of international titles that were surplus to ILGA’s requirements when the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) moved its information secretariat from Dublin to Stockholm in 1982. This collection constitutes the bedrock of the archive’s library of international titles dating back to 1951.

The archive and reference library was put on a more organised footing in Midsummer 1997 when NLGF and GCN moved into new premises on South William Street, Dublin. At that point, civil rights activist and writer Tonie Walsh directed a systematic re-organisation of its holdings. A limited public office was set up in a short time, facilitating researchers, students and journalists in addition to servicing the research needs of Gay Community News.

Although it struggled financially in the following years with finding suitable, affordable office and storage accommodation, NLGF lost no time in appointing a group of academics, historians and writers to focus on exploiting the collections and making suggestions for a future safe home. This IQA group consisted of Dr. Eibhear Walshe, lecturer in English at UCC; Dr. Mary McAuliffe and Dr. Katherine O’Donnell, both of Gender Studies at UCD; Joan Murphy, an RTE archivist; librarian Elizabeth Kirwan of NLI; and Tonie Walsh, coincidentally a former president of NLGF and founding editor of Gay Community News.

Extensive overtures and negotiations with Gerry Lyne (since retired) of the Department of Manuscripts at the National Library of Ireland ultimately bore fruit when it was agreed in 2008 to transfer the collections to NLI.

While some materials have been made public much of the collection remains inaccessible pending ongoing work by NLI  to file and index the vast amount of documents spanning the best part of fifty years.

Further information may be gleaned from the National Library website www.nli.ie

IQA holdings that have been made accessible are described as Manuscripts Collection List No. 151.