Opinion Fionnuala O ConnorBelfast's libraries vary from the battered corner store on the Oldpark Road, a formal 19th-century building defaced by rioting and vandalism, to the celebrated Linen Hall, smack opposite the City Hall. Inside, most of the city's libraries are havens. But they are also skint.
The hardship noticed most by an influential clientele is that access to the Linen Hall's famous political collection has been restricted, and finally closed, for months now; there is no money to staff it. When it reopens on April 1st, thanks to much massaging of budgets, ill-assorted book lovers will be pleased. The DUP and Sinn Féin leaders may agree on little else but they both believe the Linen Hall is a cultural jewel. Ian Paisley has testified that he "discovered with delight that the library delivers the goods"; Gerry Adams hymns it as "a vast history book, representing the entire spectrum of political thinking".
As always, Séamus Heaney outdid the politicos with a characteristic blend of lyrical and homely. "This is a place where historical archive, literary record and creative possibility are all situated," he said. "It is also important because people like it."
But people are as attached to modest public libraries, seven of which have recently been reprieved. The names might even mean something to people far from the city's mean streets: Oldpark, Whitewell, Ligoniel, Ballygomartin, Sandy Row, Ballymacarrett and Ballyhackamore, all in districts which have seen hard times. Bizarrely, Northern Ireland's allocation of cash for libraries is way behind that in the rest of the UK. Yet the Belfast reprieve, in advance of a promised direct rule rethink, may only be temporary.
The five education and library management boards are all faced with massive debt. A proposal to axe school-crossing services is one measure of the crisis. Libraries make a less dramatic case, though the tender-hearted might give them high priority too.
Most of the threatened branches serve communities with low or disappointed expectations of formal education. They're very important to women with children at home; older people whose mobility isn't great; people with disabilities. Lending-desk experience bears out today's academic surveys of need and customer profile.
What gives the Linen Hall special status, as well as its long history, is the internationally-renowned political collection, its quarter of a million exhibits including not just books but thousands of items reflecting paramilitary as well as political activities, from the bib proclaiming "Baby Prod" to the fragile note smuggled out of the Maze that announced the end of the 1981 IRA hunger strike.
When the collection reopens, a number of grand fromages as well as modest researchers will be pleased, but this is unlikely to be the last crisis.
Solidarity prompts all the libraries to point out that their problems are shared. What many admire as the Linen Hall's constant reinvention by inspired staff only protects it to a degree from the questions faced by any small single institution. The public Central Library is headquarters for 20 city branches and mobile lending libraries in addition to its own stately reading rooms. It is as grand in its way as the Linen Hall, a fine civic building that holds treasures few will ever see, including an 18th century atlas, rare and beautifully-illustrated books such as those of the American naturalist Audubon.
Storage needs as much consideration now as the question of access, and how the Central Library can be rebuilt for this century. The newspaper archive demonstrates what public libraries could be. It is also a picture of frustration: wealth of material, patient staff, little space and too few and inadequate microfilm machines.
If you want the history of Linfield football club, you can walk in off the street and track it down but only if you wait for an over-used machine, faulty and muddy to read. A faithful if worn user says: "You can open an ancient paper, because it's too fragile for microfilm, and read on a yellowing page the Newsletter's report of Henry Joy McCracken's execution. You can only read the Belfast Telegraph's accounts of much of the Home Rule crisis, for example, on that blasted microfiche."
But as one veteran worker observes sadly: "The reason most people come into libraries is to look at and borrow books and it's distressing that we haven't been able to sustain that service."
The past year's crisis meant no money for buying books, so Belfast's libraries can not provide the new edition of Lost Lives, for example, the compendium of the Troubles' deaths.
Oldpark, the Falls, the Shankill, Ligoniel, any day of the week sees young women with babies, older women alone and elderly men browsing with decreasing hope through diminishing stores. A proud city, whose tradition of public reading rooms pre-dates even the Linen Hall, should be abashed at the fate of today's libraries.