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The deeds of a home may go back centuries – and many tell interesting stories, writes PAT IGOE

WHEN YOU BUY a house or an apartment (especially an apartment), the number and variety of documents of title that your solicitor takes away in his or her briefcase on your closing day can be exciting, or just baffling.

The deeds may include many very quaint and curiously worded, hand-written parchments going back to the 19th century or earlier. Even a new house may have old documents. But no matter how old, they must be examined by your solicitor.

They may seem boring but they can contain a rich portrait of the history of a house and its occupants over the centuries. Our family home in Tullamore was built in 1836 and has had a variety of occupants, from a businessman to a commercial traveller to a Garda Superintendent – and of course their families.

For some houses and apartments, especially in the cities of Dublin and Cork, the title deeds can even go back to the 17th century. They were the ones that were not in the Four Courts during the shelling in 1922, but rather in solicitors’ offices and banks and under people’s mattresses.

Many deeds were destroyed in the Four Courts explosion. With them went huge stores of knowledge of the local history of various parts of the country. Maps attached to deeds give further detail, with such address descriptions as “beside Wilkies’ field” for houses in Ballinclea Heights in Killiney, Co Dublin.

But the days of large bundles of documents of title being handed from solicitor to solicitor and being read afresh every time a property is sold are quickly coming to an end. Increasingly, old deeds are going into the Land Registry and not coming back out. But they are never destroyed. It’s estimated there are now between 10 million and 11 million documents of title held by the Land Registry in its repository in Santry, Dublin. The number is continually growing.

These documents are of personal, legal and even political significance and are carefully preserved and protected.

“We have one of the most comprehensive systems in the world of registering titles,” according to John Deeney, deputy registrar in the Land Registry, which is part of the Property Registration Authority, and which continues to play a major role in bringing conveyancing in Ireland into the 21st century and reducing its cost.

Almost 88 per cent of property titles in Ireland are now registered in the Land Registry. About 95 per cent of the land is registered there. The percentage is growing with compulsory registration now extended to the entire country. So, they take your documents and do not give them back. You don’t need them. They stay there forever.

In their place, the Land Registry issues a simple, State-guaranteed document called a folio, which gives a description of the house or apartment, says who owns it and indicates whether there are any burdens on it such as mortgages or even rights of way. There is also a map attached.

For the moment at least, the deeds archived by the Land Registry in Santry, Dublin 9, can only be inspected and examined and copied by the owners of the houses or apartments to which the deeds refer. In special circumstances, such as perhaps for historical research, deeds may be inspected and copied by others.

But before old deeds end up in permanent cold storage in the Land Registry, they will already be well-travelled. Having been in solicitors offices and banks up and down the country, they now finally go to the local Land Registry office in Dublin, Roscommon or Waterford. From there, they are legally checked, approved, replaced by a simple State-guaranteed folio and then sent to be carefully mothballed in the Santry repository.

Even for an ordinary house or apartment, documents of title may have their own interesting stories to tell.

Pat Igoe is a solicitor in Blackrock, Co Dublin