No: 24 The Queer Irish Archive
by Orla Howard
The recent snow event reminded me how much I loved an old Honda CRV jeep that we had in our house throughout the noughties. For the years we had that car it never gave any trouble, and as well as being brilliant in snow it was able to transport very large items without too much dismantling of seats etc.
For much of this time I was a board member of the National Lesbian and Gay Federation (NLGF). Among the big areas of the NLGF’s work at that time were: social and political activism; keeping GCN afloat through very tough financial times; and trying to be good caretakers and custodians of the Irish Queer Archive (IQA).
The IQA was (and still is) the most important archive of our LGBT+ history. The collection of materials started in the 1970s. The collection includes more than 250,000 news clippings, every Irish gay and lesbian magazine published since 1974, a large number of international LGBT+ titles – some dating back to the 1950s. Over the following years the archive grew to include posters, community organisation minutes, flyers, periodicals, research reports, slides, photographs, videotapes and DVDs, reference books, posters, badges, flags and T-shirts. For most of its existence it has been curated by the legendary Tonie Walsh, and as it grew to a considerable size the question of where to house it became a concern for the NLGF.
Back to the Honda. When GCN and the IQA had to move out of the South William St offices in 1995 the now boxed-up precious materials from the IQA began (several) road trip(s) around Dublin in people’s cars to storage places that included people’s houses, people’s offices, Outhouse (newly at that time in the Capel Street building), a borrowed retail unit in Dun Laoghaire, and later to one of those sterile rental storage spaces on the outskirts of Dublin.
NLGF board members, and the specially formed group to secure the future of the IQA (Eibhear Walshe, Mary McAuliffe, Katherine O’Donnell, Joan Murphy, Elizabeth Kirwan, and Tonie Walsh,) humped the precious archive in and out of car boots, buildings and storage units. The Honda was, by now, very well aquainted with the archive, as was my partner Grainne, who with much encouragement, was roped into each move.
I was delighted (and Grainne was a little relieved) when, in 2008, the IQA group and the NLGF came to an agreement with the National Library that the archive would be housed there. It felt right that our queer historicial materials would be housed in the country’s national Library.
We did the final move from the storage facilty on the Naas Road to my office in Hatch Street and from there to the library. Tonie and I dropped off the last few boxes to Kildare Street together in the Honda. I had a nervous and hopeful feeling – it felt like I was dropping a child off to a boarding school.
The understanding with the National Library in 2008 was that the archive would be catalogued (resources permitting) and made available to the public. The IQA is a living archive and has been added to in the subsequent years. I understand that currently access is quite restricted and resources allocated have been limited. I hope that changes.