Rev. Dr. Norman Gamble:

The Irish Railway Records Society was founded in 1946 and is based in the former goods offices at Heuston Station in Dublin. It holds the non-statutory archives of the various railway companies which became part of CIE. The statutory records - minutes, share registers, etc., - are held by the CIE group. The society works closely with Irish Rail, the Rail Safety Commission, the rail accident investigation unit and the Railway Procurement Agency. In addition to our archives, we have a publishing programme, a regular journal, and a library and meetings in Dublin, Cork and London. If one goes to the 1911 census on the National Archives website, one will see a 1911 Dublin tram timetable which the library made available from its collection as part of the census digitisation project.

The strength of our position is that we are widely known among railway staff some of whom are members and, therefore, when offices get cleared, we often get a telephone call. As a specialist archive, we are probably best likened to military archives.

The focus of my presentation will be on staff records. In the year of the Lock-out centenary, we have complete staff records from the Dublin United Tramway Company, although only from 1923 as its headquarters were burned down in the Civil War. However, our main focus is on railway company archives. The railways were the biggest employers collectively in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland and in addition to running trains, they ran hotels, docks and engineering workshops. We hold staff records for all the big companies and some of the smaller ones.

In 1924 all the companies lying entirely within the Free State were formed into the Great Southern Railway. This company was allowed to buy out competing bus and lorry operators and we have a comprehensive set of bus driver and conductor records from the 1930s. The main body of our staff records are in ledgers from the main railway companies. Some are grouped by stations, such as Cork or Limerick, while some companies had a simple chronological ledger. These generally go back to the 1880s. Some of the smaller companies, such as the Cavan and Leitrim ones, have all their staff in one ledger. Cork had five railway companies and we have records for three of them.

The case of the Great Northern Railway is unique as we have a card index which, subject to some limitations, gives comprehensive coverage of all departments of what was until 1958 a cross-Border body. We have records of the company's staff for all of Northern Ireland. As an aside, it is worth noting that those who enlisted in the First World War were given a crimson card with the heading "European war". The Great Northern Railway records are probably the most comprehensive as the engineering department records are patchy to say the least for CIE.

We have through voluntary endeavour provided finding aides for some of these volumes and continue to do so. Our latest project is to create a database of pensioners for the Great Southern and Western Railway in 1907. Pensions then, as now, were a touchy subject. When the old age pension was introduced in 1906, the Great Southern and Western Railway told all its existing pensioners to claim the old age pension. They were then told their company pensions would be adjusted to compensate. There is a voluminous file of correspondence on this matter and we are creating a database that will cover many hundreds of railway workers in the largesse of the Irish railway companies, some of whom were employed from the opening of the line in 1846.

At the other end of the timescale, we have a full list of the thousands of Great Southern Railway staff who volunteered for service in the LDF during the Emergency. We also have files covering enlistment in Northern Ireland showing the lengths to which the Great Northern Railway went to keep its staff from voluntarily enlisting by having them designated as essential workers. We are carrying out this database project to help researchers but also to protect individual files from multiple handling.

We now come to our dilemma which is how to conserve the material and protect it from further deterioration.

We have rebound ledgers some with assistance from the Heritage Council but this is only a partial solution. Digitisation in a searchable format is the way forward but is beyond the means of the society at present. We open our archives to the public each Tuesday evening and provide a service to historians and those seeking more information about their family history. However, this is as far as we can go as a voluntary body. In addition to these opening hours, we commit additional hours to listing material, drawing up finding aids and dealing with Internet and postal queries.

In addition to family history it is worth, in the context of the decade of centenaries, outlining a selection of what we possess of a political nature. We have the founding memorandum of the Dublin Employers Federation, together with a large file on the 1911 railway strike which is often considered to be a dry-run for 1913. There are files on the European War, as it was then called, with material on the employment of wounded soldiers and veterans. Sean Heuston was a clerk of the Great Southern and Western Railway Company. His execution is recorded briefly in red ink in the staff record. The staff registers record service in the war and we can see that many returnee veterans did not last long in employment, such was their poor physical and mental health. This material continues to be of interest to historians.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to outline our archival activity.