The destruction of the Four Courts at the start of the Irish Civil War will be the subject of a public lecture in Galway next week.
Dr John M Regan will deliver the lecture in the Town Hall Theatre studio on Monday March 10 at 8pm. The event is being organised by the NUI Galway Centre for the History of Labour and Class.
In the opening engagement of the civil war, on June 30 1922, the irreplaceable archive held in the Public Records Office inside Dublin’s Four Courts was destroyed by fire and explosion, with the Free State forces and anti-treaty IRA blaming each other for the loss of precious archival material.
In recent years some historians have claimed that anti-treaty forces deliberately destroyed the archive as an act of vandalism before surrendering to the Army. However Dr Regan will argue that the evidence for this is far from conclusive. He will also look at the different ways in which such events are written about, and demonstrate how some historians reinterpreted the past, not always accurately, in response to the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’
Admission is €3/2 and all are welcome.
