Film archive from revolutionary Ireland to be sold at auction

A rare archive of film from the Irish revolutionary period will be sold at auction on Saturday.

Six hours of film in total was shot during the Easter Rising, War of Independence and Civil War. Some of it was sold to newsreel companies for showing in the cinema, but a lot of it was unpublished.

It includes the aftermath of the Easter Rising, the funeral of Thomas Ashe in 1917, the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Croke Park in 1920, the killing of Seán Treacy in Dublin’s Talbot Street in the same year and sectarian murders and burnings in Belfast and Derry in the 1920s.

Footage from 1922 includes Michael Collins on the election trail in Cork, Civil War scenes including the siege of the Four Courts and Collins’s funeral.

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It will be sold at auction by Whyte’s with a guide price of between €200,000 and €300,000.

The archive was originally owned by Maurice Baum, a Dublin-based film distributor who passed it on to his son Bernard who sold at a Whyte’s auction in 2006. It has since been owned by a private collector whose identity is not being revealed by the auction house.

Whyte’s is describing it as a “unique opportunity to acquire what must be one of the most interesting and important archives of historic Irish film inside or outside of institutional collections”.

An autograph book of members of the Irish delegation which negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty has a guide price of between €4,000 and €6,000. The book was owned by Alice Lyons, one of two sisters, the other being Ellie Lyons, who were secretaries to the Anglo-Irish Treaty delegation.

The book includes the signatures of all five men who signed the treaty – Collins, Arthur Griffith, Eamonn Duggan, Robert Barton and Charles Gavan Duffy.

Duggan’s 1916 Easter Rising medal engraved with his name, his War of Independence medal and the Tricolour that was draped across his coffin during his funeral in 1936 have a guide price of €8,000-€12,000.

The Eclectic Collector auction takes place on Saturday between 10am and 5pm.