Archive on Rising to become available

A huge archive of eyewitness accounts from the years immediately before and after the 1916 Rising will be available to the public next year. They have been locked away for 50 years.

The documents, based on interviews with those in the independence struggle from 1913 to 1921, follow a 10-year investigation by Defence Forces archivists ordered by the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, in 1947.

The Bureau of Military History, as the collection is called, comprised 1,800 individual statements and some 36,000 pages.

However, in keeping with a promise to interviewees that the material would not be published until after their deaths, the archive was stored at the Department of the Taoiseach until the Cabinet gave the go-ahead last year for its public display.

Since then, a team of archivists at Cathal Brugha barracks, Dublin, has been preparing the material. The work is expected to be finished by autumn and the collection will then be available to the public.

A Defences Forces archivist, Comdt Victor Laing, said yesterday the documents would be of particular interest for the account they gave of Easter week 1916. A "very, very small" amount of the material might still be withheld because of personal sensitivities, but the intention was to make the absolute maximum available.

Many statements were prepared over a period of years, with repeated editing until an agreed final draft was witnessed by the person interviewed.

Most of the participants were nationalists. An IRA man, Dan Breen, whose account of the period was published as My Fight for Irish Freedom, was among those interviewed. However, a number of British army and Royal Irish Constabulary accounts are included.

The archive also includes 12 recordings by such people as W.T. Cosgrave and the widow of the 1916 signatory, Eamon Ceannt.

Comdt Laing cautioned against expectations of anything "phenomenally revealing" in the documents. He said the 160 boxes in the collection compared with more than 16,000 in the Defence Forces' total archive.