Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

If one goes next door to the National Library one will see shelf after shelf of these calendars of documents which were carefully copied out and edited. If one had the originals, they would be on a practically illegible scroll at this stage and probably in another language or interpreted. Sometimes the calendars of documents are written in the original Latin, but probably in a kind of modernised or standardised form. We simply must rely on the work they did then.

Having done a little research on different matters, my instinct is that while the losses in 1922 were terrible, a great many documents, especially Government and legal ones, would have been copied. The fact that documents were destroyed does not mean that there is not a copy of them somewhere else and of course there were copyists employed. Although I do not want to digress, for example, family history genealogists copied out extracts of documents such as wills and marriage contracts. Therefore, the net loss was somewhat less than is imagined. In any case, the majority of the work to make accessible to scholars all these vast calendars of documents which are involved in this legislation was done before 1922.