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A Westmeath Libraries podcast where we chat with a variety of local historians. We'll learn what started them on the path towards history and they'll share some gems of our local history collection
Welcome to the Westmeath Libraries podcast. Today, we are celebrating local history and having a chat with Dr. John Gibney of the Royal Irish Academy. Hi, John. Welcome to Athlone Library.
John:Thanks for having us, Lorna.
Lorna:No problem. Before I delve into your role with the Royal Irish Academy, can I ask, have you always had an interest in history, or where did it stem from?
John:I suppose yeah. You know, public libraries in Dublin if no Westmeath had a big role to play in that. I mean, I suppose I always had an interest in history, going back to being a kid, and I suppose the first of the history books I'd habe ever been looking at were put old textbooks on the Celts and the Romans and this type of thing.
John:You know? And then, I was regularly dragged up to Raheny Public Library growing up. So the interest was there. Anyway, if I was to choose one particular thing that triggered an interest and kinda put me on the career path I ended up having, It would be the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. Because I was in school at the time.
John:I was doing my Leaving Cert . All of a sudden something was happening. You didn't know what, but you knew it was of significance. Yeah. And I remember the day of the ceasefire or either the day itself or very soon afterwards.
John:I remember going up to Donamede Library and borrowing Tom Barry's Guerrilla Days in Ireland.
Lorna:Oh, yeah. You know?
John:Yeah. And it just you just have a sense of, well, there's something happening. You're trying to get a wider perspective on it. And that, I suppose, triggered it. Now I began at some stage it occured to me, I'd like to do a degree in history.
John:Mhmm. And despite the fact that I ended up getting a doctorate in it, I was never very good at leaving cert. I only got a D 3.
Lorna:There's hope for his own.
John:Yeah. So I mean, I'd like to think that I'm walking proof that the Leaving Cert needs reform.
Lorna:Are you from an academic family?
John:No. I mean, my family was a lot of tradesman. No. So, I was probably one of the I mean, one of my brothers went to went to technical college, you know, qualified mechanic, before doing something thing else himself. You know?
John:And I was the first to go to university.
Lorna:University. Yeah.
John:And I initially, it was I was studying TV and radio production as a PLC. Okay. When I had a chance encounter with my old Irish and English teacher, because the school I went to Greendale Community School, which is since closed, it did have this kind of link to Trinity College. There was a kind of like Trinity has a form more formal access program now, but there was a way of getting in for students who mightn't be, particularly good at exams or will come from say, you know, disadvantaged backgrounds or whatever. There was a pathway in before the access programs form was, and that got me in to do a degree. Now I went in full of 1916 and all this and in the 1st year was hit with a broad side of medieval history stuff. I still can't get my head around medieval history. But in the course of the degree, I began to take a particular interest in early modern history. In fact, probably most of my degree was early modern history.
Lorna:Okay.
John:The Tudors, the enlightenment, stuff like this, even Tudor Ireland, Tudor England. And exposed it to a range of historical writing that's, you know, perspectives in the past. You wouldn't normally have, like, French cultural historians, you know, people like Carlo Ginzburg, stuff you'd never come across In Irish historical writing. You know?
John:And I suppose at the back of your mind, it was still in the sense that now in this interest, I've been triggered by contemporary events, and I firmly believe now a lot of historians might get a bit sniffy about this because if you suggest that you're somehow that your perspective on on the past is in some way influenced by the present, then you're somehow admitting that you're not being as objective and scholarly as you possibly could be. But that's just life. Everyone is coming from somewhere, you know. Like, yeah, I started off a book I wrote about historical writing, with a little note from John McGahern where he met the the late professor JC Beckett in Queens. And Beckett was a very good writer.
John:Mhmm. You know, books still stand up well today, but McGahern goes, I met the late president JC Beckett, and, you know, I remarked, on how I admired his books, and then I admire the clarity of his writing. And Beckett's response apparently began was, but of course, you're prejudiced. You know, and everyone's coming from somewhere. Yeah.
John:So as a whole, what you're trying to do is trying to, you know, you can't you can't try and understand the past purely of light of the present, but you're trying to strike a balance between understanding on its own terms and seeing how how does it matter today because the past has shaped us.
Lorna:Mhmm.
John:And there's a there's a tension there, like, you know, we we know. And I suppose the key thing is, like, you're trying to be you know, and Trinity was big on sending me into archives for undergraduate essay. As far as they were concerned, get a big library, use it. You're round the corner from National Library, go up and use that
Lorna:Interesting.
John:Like, you know, lectures like the late day, which is Patrick who taught me would have been big on that. Go out and cook up your own essay topics and go off and research them.
Lorna:Oh, brilliant. Yeah. Yeah.
John:And when you're doing that, you kinda it kinda drives it. When you when you're a bit closer to the raw material like you've made sense of the past with, you kinda get a sense that you know what's happened. We know how things have panned out but the people in the past didn't, you know. And I was trying to get that mindset where all options lay on the table. So looking at that kind of stuff was a great experience. And there was one particular thing we did at the end of my 1st year, which was that it used to be a thing called a student summer job scheme, which was a you could work for some kind of worthy institution and get a nominal, you know, payment for it.
John:And I end up doing it in doing this in the National Library on behalf of Locke's Distillery in Kilbeggan.
Lorna:Okay.
John:So there's a Westmeath connection there. We were thrown into an archival collection. And, you know, archives are they're not just there for people to look at down the line. They're collected for certain reasons.
John:They they were generated for particular purposes. Like, these are the business accounts at the lockes. But it was an incredible experience just to just to go into and just root around was this, understand the patterns, the scandal that affected the distiller in the late 19 forties, the seasonal patterns of employment, and so forth. So I kinda left the degree with a good grounding and actually, I suppose, good old fashioned digging around in archives and looking at stores.
Lorna:It's unusual nearly, isn't it?
John:Because Yeah. Trinity was good for it, but I had an extra extra the the locks thing was a brilliant thing to do for us. Yeah. Now after degree the plan was... that I had a vague plan to upgrade Canada. Oddly enough, in conjunction with a friend of mine who had worked out with the Lockes team who was from Athlone herself, but that's another story .
John:A few of us would think have this notion of going to Canada. That fell through. And I kinda realized that the local authority grant I had done on for my undergraduate degree would cover a further course of study. So I thought I'll go back and do a master in history.
John:Now this was early modern history, and I kinda realized in the course of that's like, there's no there was no particular plan here to become become a historian in some ways. You know? At the same time, you don't wanna think you don't wanna give the impression that you were crawling around like a headless chicken Yeah. Stumbling into whatever Yeah. Came across your path.
Lorna:Just didn't want to leave college.
John:No. Yeah. But I kinda realized that, the idea of doing some kind of postgraduate studies in history, that was on the road. That was vaguely in the ether. Something I might like to do.
John:This accelerated us because the the 1 year master became the PhD over a course of 5 years on 17th century history with the late Aiden Clark in Trinity College, because I never studied 17th century Ireland. So you kinda thought, does it count I've done 16th century, the 18th, the 19th, the 17th. You know, that was I was curious about it. So we it did it on the Popish plot in Ireland, which was an an outbreak of anti Catholic paranoia in England in the 1670s and early 1680s and how that impacted upon Ireland. And probably the most famous Irish angle to it will be, the execution of Oliver Plunkett who was executed as part of this.
John:So we did that. And, you know, when we in the course of doing the degree, you had to make a living. And this was like naughties the naughties where Yeah. It was just before a recession. And there were various bits and pieces you could do to, to make a living.
John:And the 2 that I found myself doing, well, there were 3. One was doing a bit of genealogy. You know? Back then, that gave way to walking tours in Dublin, and this was a great experience.
John:I think anyone I mean, there's a place for specialized knowledge, but you also have to communicate these things. So if you're gonna talk with the tourists Yeah. And part of our our kinda trick was we didn't sell tickets at the start. You know, we'd sell them a little halfway through everything. Yeah.
John:Which was fair enough because at the time when TripAdvisor came along because no one could feel ripped off because they had the chance to leave. Yeah.
Lorna:Absolutely. Well,
John:you may have to explain these, you were explaining this stuff to yourself, and you began to develop the knack of explaining the concepts, these concepts that matter, you know. And, I mean, the walking tours was led to a couple of books, and I'll come back to that in a moment. But the other thing I would have done was working on the dictionary of Irish biography which was published by the Royal Irish Academy. So on the one hand I was doing was doing a PhD, was also doing a job that taught me how to explain this stuff to people.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:But the dictionary, was working part time for it for about a year and a half, and the deal with it was that you have to write a biography a week roughly. 3 to 4 a month. So we're also learning to write quickly and non spec and to research and other things. So, you know, and these skills are I mean, I'm a big just pick up skills to go along, you know, and I try and get as much experience as possible to go, you know, you know, in some ways I kinda, you know, fully funded PhDs don't have those opportunities. Now the opportunities might be there, but it kinda offered them I mean, at one stage, I think I stopped doing a PhD for 6 months because, you know, I was I was juggling 2 jobs and you have to do it.
John:Yeah. And, you know, know, my supervisor, Clark, he was around with that because he recognized that way it wasn't getting, you know, it wasn't getting full funding by any means. You know? The jobs were necessary so that was fair enough. Now a career in academia is an unlikely prospect at the best of times.
John:At the same time, I wouldn't tell someone to turn around and not do a PhD. So it's a good experience. It's rewarding, but just have a plan b and don't Yeah. Bank on it. No.
John:I was looking at I got 2 postdoctoral fellowships in succession I have to do with the doctorate. 1, at the University of Notre Dame, which has a major Irish center in Indiana, which is a remarkable experience, an incredible resource center for, for Irish history. So that that kinda let me write up my thesis into a book and also begin another project. And someone said to me that, you know, the bit when you can tell when someone is starting to go cold in an area in history when they stop writing about it and they start writing about what people have written about it. And this became the basis for a second post doctorate fellowship in Galway.
John:And partly, you know I can remember when I got the call from Notre Dame. I was sitting in the in the Stag's head open building with a friend of mine who has since become an archivist. And I was talking about, because we recognize there's no there's no jobs in this game. Yeah. You know, there's nothing.
John:So I was talking about going to Spain and teaching English some half baked notion, but then quite literally a few minutes later, I got the call. And they said very specifically, you know, you've got the fellowship, but you have to finish your doctorate . That's the deal. So it got it got finished quickly, you know, like, and I owe, Clark, a great deal then.
John:Well, great deal for helping me get it across the line. Followed that up with a second a second post doctorate fellowship in Galway. And well, maybe because it was the only thing I was offered. It's also the only thing I wanted, and I was driven by the fact that I wanted to you know, I was like always. Yeah.
John:The chance to live there was good fun. And as well as that, you know, it was working with Nicholas Canny who was another extremely eminent early modernist in Galway
Lorna:Yeah.
John:So that ultimately became a book entitled The Shadow of a Year, the 1641 Rebellion in Irish History Memory, which is a study of 3 centuries of historical writing of the 1641 rebellion So one of the foundational events in Irish history. Now the fellowship and these research fellowships are geared towards a purpose. I suppose they're also meant to be kind of an apprenticeship in a way and that at the end of this, you're meant to be set up for getting Yeah. A job.
John:But if we'll reflect back on more recent history, anyone who could remember will remember that September 2009 was not a good time to be ending a contract in any walk of life whatsoever. We're in the middle of the recession, and the day was up. You know? Yeah. I mean, precarity across higher education, people being forced to work on effectively 0 hours contracts and, you know, teaching being farmed out to people on very, very low paying commissions is a disgrace.
John:In 2009, everyone's gone.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:So, I mean, I finished I kind of moved back to Dublin. I just had to sign on the dole for a while. And I did remember thinking, right, this is this is it. You know, had my 3 years. I did the total war in academia.
John:It's almost certainly gone. You know? Everything was closing down. Everything was being constricted. You know?
John:And even even doing a doctorate, you were signed when taking that, you know, well, I won't get a job. I won't get a job as an academic, but you'll get a job doing something because you're employable. Yeah. All the somethings were gone as well. You know?
John:The economy had contracted so much. And I kinda threw myself back at the mercy of walking tours, doing bits of genealogy of jobs I've done before. Mhmm. I was able to draw up on former employers who I hadn't annoyed too much,
John:But one thing was adamant about that, I wanted to finish the book that had started in Galway. I left Galway with 45,000 words written of what became a 70,000 word book. And I remember saying to myself, you know, I'd like to finish it. And I'd also like to be able to turn around to a future employer who says to me, what did I do in Galway for 2 years?
Lorna:Yeah.
Lorna:I'd be able to say I did that. Yeah. You know, I'd be able to say I finished it out. You know, it I produced the goods. So that came out in 2013.
John:And it's probably the book I'm most proud of, of many I've been involved in because, you know, for various reasons, you know, I think it it did a good job on us. Yeah. But hopefully it adds some kinda add something to knowledge, you know. And now at that stage, it was back to walking tours. And a chap I knew from doing them before, a guy called Lorcan Collins.
John:But I had to work on a couple of ideas, and Lorcan was doing was involved in coming up with an idea for a series of biographies called 16 Lives, which is basically a biography each for every one of the executed 1916 leaders. And I was chatting in one day and I thought, hey. that'd be be interesting? You know.
John:Is there anyone doing, someone like Thomas McDonough? Good to do. You know? Because to me, if I were you, I'd develop an interest in Sean Heuston. Fair enough.
John:And I've had a thought, sure. Why not? Because, you know, if you're doing Walking Tours with the Easter Rising, you know, you need to know a bit more. You know? And I wrote a short biography in that series.
John:In a way in a weird way, it was kinda like a weird sort of relaxation. You know? I enjoyed doing it. You know? I was also, you know, no one had written something like this before.
John:You were writing it from scratch.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:You know. And as well as that, it was also an opportunity to try and write something deliberately for you know, those 2 were with academic presence, you know. I thought, right, this is for writing the O'Brien press. It's a it's a trade publisher. You wanna write it to be accessible.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:And that kind of steered me into the whole world of centenaries. And, like, over the next couple of years, you know, allow us to make a make a make a living as a job in historian, so to speak, you know. And doing the Heuston book was was fascinating in another level because I was living in and around in Stoney Batter in Dublin 7, which was quite near to where Heuston had lived and worked. And the historically, it's a very, very rich part of the city. K.
John:So, it wasn't as if you were looking at the the documentary record. You could go around and think that he was he was baptized in that church. He worked in the train station. We can do that. Trained in that hall.
John:You know, he he walked down. He occupied that that building on the quays. And that's another thing. Like, you know, we kinda history isn't just about the physicality. It's about the physicality of everything that's around us.
John:It's not just what's written down. You know? Many you know, there's a sense that, you know, many would say that Irish historiography could be quite conservative relative to other countries' historiographies. And in a way that's understandable because other countries, there's more there's more people, there's more resources, you know. But, you know, I suppose when I started with history, it was still very much a discipline based on the written word.
John:Whereas, you know, it need not be. Like, physical material culture has a big role to play there, you know. Music, cultural history, literature, these are all parts, I mean, I think I always like that kind of idea of total history, you know, where everything everything in the past is kinda linked together. It's kinda it's all part of the package, so to speak.
John:So I was involved doing centenaries for a couple of years, doing walking tours. You know, worked for Wordwell books for a while, which publish History Ireland and so forth. Yeah. And, I remember one time talking to a friend of mine and, you know, I was thinking like, Jesus, you know, I'd love some certainty you know. Well, for you, you've got a nice, handy public sector job.
John:You know, a bit of certainty, and he goes, yeah. But at the same time, you're getting to work on some stuff that's interesting. Yeah. You know? Like it was I I did and there's stuff I probably would never have done otherwise, but I was kinda thinking, right, is there any way you can kinda any way you can make a living out of this?
John:I mean, it's the skill set, you know. It's like, I made a a radio documentary for RTE. It was saying it's about street gangs in Dublin, which I actually got to record my father for, you know.
Lorna:Oh, no way.
John:So it starts off with my father, and then at one stage, a seagull crapping all over me, on Meath Street has I'm walking with a microphone. And at at this stage, it was fairly obvious that the academic career path that I had started to bank on after I'd the PhDs. It's like doing the postdoctoral fellowships, you began to think, well, maybe this could go somewhere. It's obvious that was dead.
John:But I kinda I found myself writing various books because you you just by by default, you'd end up having lots of notes and things and things Yeah. Laying around and you kinda think, would it be a shame not to use them? So I wrote I would have written them... The walking tours fed into an illustrated history of Dublin that I did. And a lot of the 1916 stuff, I did a little book about the the, the history of the Easter Rising of 50 objects, which might be upstairs in that long public library. And then I would have written I wrote I realized there was a gap in the market for a short general history of Ireland.
John:I kinda thought, alright. Full 17th century Ireland. Full of a bit of modern Ireland. Lots of notes on the rest. So I wrote a book with a pretty straightforward title of A Short History of Ireland Oh, wow.
John:For Yale University Press. This is a book that probably had the biggest reach of any I'd done,
Lorna:you know.
John:I hope it's just hopefully going into the 2nd edition now as well next year. Oh, I'll do. And, I just figured you might as well you might as well put these out there. Yeah. You know, in a way you go back to that that kind of experience working in the dictionary advisory.
John:You're used to writing because of the and then use I like to leave, you know, just not throwing it out but get it out there as well.
Lorna:A lot of historians probably have all those notes and they're in a house. They're somewhere. They're never read or never
John:They might be. They might have the chance. Like, I like, I wasn't working a full time job and in a way, I I I wanted a book to sell. Yeah. And I also it it was kinda meant to be to go in a bit where that tied off that part of my life and go on and do something else.
John:Yeah. And at this stage, it'll be getting to 2014, 2015. So after a few years, this day, I think, right, what am I going to do is try to retrain or whatever. Mhmm. Then I got dragged back into, into Auckland's Trinity and Glasnevin Cemetery.
John:They set up this job, a joint position between them.
Lorna:Right.
John:Half in Trinity and half in Glasnevin . And I went for it, didn't get it. But then we got the call to cover the maternity leave in person. It didn't get it. Okay.
John:And I thought to myself, we like we like our own thing. But I realized it would have involved working at Glasnevin Cemetery during the centenary of the east of writing.
Lorna:Oh, yeah.
John:And I kind of thought of myself. It's hard. Yeah. It's hard to say no to
Lorna:Oh, yeah.
John:You know, like, yeah. Opportunity. Which was a fascinating experience in a remarkable institution. And I stayed on at Glasnevin for another while, as their education officer for another year, on an out home basis, an in as an intro basis before I finally joined the Royal Irish Academy. And, you know, when I joined the academy, it was initially to help produce a centenary book.
John:So all this experience being involved in centenaries, producing illustrated books, working at publishing, you know. Mhmm. Almost from this was completely divorced from what I started out doing to a 17th century scholarly history. Yeah. And, basically, I joined, one of the research programs in the academy.
John:It was called documents in Irish foreign policy, which is where I am now. Okay. And what we always thought was probably the last place was after picking up. Yeah. These things happen.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:And then I suppose the core of what we do is we edit and publish archive material related to Ireland's foreign relations from 1919 up to the present. Now lots of them have similar projects. Like, you may the Americans were the first to do it and they started doing it just before the civil war. So this kind of stuff has a lot of genealogy. Yeah.
John:And one thing from the decade as a team, I suppose, is there's a with a much greater sense that there's archives out there that can be made accessible. Let's say the military archives, which is a tremendous institution, tremendous, you know, willingness to get, you know, the public records out there and have the view that that that the people's records, you know, so they should be accessible to people. And we'd we would do a similar thing. So we basically publish them in these kind of these volumes every every 2 years. Yeah.
John:We're currently up to 1969 and the one I'm working on at the moment due out this time next year, late 2024 will be from 1969 to 1973. So covering the outbreak of troubles and the bloodiest period of the troubles as well. And one thing about this material is that, you know, you could look at it and think, about, you know, receipts for Ferrero Rochers and this kind of thing, you know. But the Irish diplomatic service are quite small, so there's a huge amount in in those records. You know, like, if if if we address an art, for example Mhmm.
John:The the the files of the Department of Foreign Affairs, which are in the National Archives and they're released under the the so called authority rule. They're filled with ephemera taken from embassies for exhibitions Yeah. Examples of design. It's it's, you know, it's a really like we're only function We're functioned as a core material Mhmm. Like the policy making.
John:We're also trying to reflect what Irish people witnessed as well. Yeah. You know, the
Lorna:whole business like, yeah.
John:Yeah. And not just in Ireland, you know. It's you know, one of some of the some of the I mean, the only, the only English language diplomatic reports from Nazi Nazi occupied Europe and access Europe are those with Irish diplomats. So we call this them, you know. Okay.
John:And I suppose it's basically trying to make source material accessible. And at the same time, you're gonna have to go and tell it out like it's in part of the day job, we've embarked on a couple of exhibitions. Mhmm. A couple of years ago, we would have co curated the big centenary exhibition on, the mark centenary of the signing of the anti virus treaty, which I would put as a career highlight.
Lorna:Oh, yeah.
John:More recent times, we would have curated one on on Irish membership of the League of Nations. And, you know, there's other other things that, you know, a couple years ago myself and my colleague, Kayla Bali, would have written a small book on the, the handover to the cast of Martin. That's a theory. And, you know, that's something that brings us back to public libraries because, you know, it's all real saying you do you you know, you're working history and all that, you know, fine. But there has to be an infrastructure that facilitates that, you know.
John:And we kind of forget that it's not it's not just an infrastructure based in universities. Mhmm. You know, cultural institutions like the National Archives and National Library of IT and Garden. But the public library network is incredible, you know. We wrote most of that book during the COVID pandemic.
John:Yeah. And huge amounts of the material that we use for it, we we source from public libraries. Yeah. You know, both from where you are now and also when you were working on modules.
Lorna:Yeah. That's when I met you.
John:You would see you would see lost stuff with the Yeah. The country.
Lorna:You figured you were studying something Yeah. At the castle.
John:And it it is important to kind of, to to to put there's a place for specialized knowledge, of course. Mhmm. But there's also a place for, for getting for for making that more accessible. So alongside the kind of those kind of things, you know, that's why you have that's why you might have an exhibition.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:And I mean, his his history is a very it's it's a notoriously more reflective discipline, but it's a great aligned the whole way resonated me with, I think it was the image historian AJP Taylor who came up with it, that basically history of studying the past was a way of expanding the the base range of your own in person experience with which to make sense of the world. And I think that's
Lorna:Okay. Yeah.
John:That's a that's that's the the approach I would kinda think, you know. Mhmm. So I mean, you know, the way in which, like, we the way in which, you know, one one thing I find doing a court job is the the the linkages between Ireland and the wider world, which are obvious to Irish people as we're a small country. You know? But if you say, you know, the resources of it, like I say, you know, we're recording this Nattelon library.
John:Mhmm. Couple of years ago, I would have used that the the local studies collection here to write a short biography of that of a guy called Eamon Bulfon. Now he's from Ofly, so I hope that won't let ball me But forgive you. Around these files. But why write why write a biography then of Bulfon?
John:During the decade of centenaries, we would've we would've played a lot placed a good deal of emphasis on the period from 1919 to 1923. Because even before the Irish Free State came into existence, it was got a propaganda network of defragile diplomats. So, you know, there was a good bit of interest at this. And one of these was a guy called Bulfin. And Bulfon was, his main claim to fame was being he's one of the people who pulled one of the flags up over the GPO in
Lorna:19 Okay.
John:It it's assumed up in the tri color. And then there's a bit of confusion about which may not be in the tri color, but it's safe to say you put up one of them. Okay. Now Bolton was, he's buried in Maffley. Mhmm.
John:He was born about Azaris. His father was, his father was from Maffley. His mother was actually from near Mote.
Lorna:Good spot.
John:And the indeed. I'm all for it myself. As the father of 2 young Mote, if there is such a term. Well, I realized that I'm like one of one of our sister research programs, the Academy is a dictionary of Irish biography, which readers may be familiar with. They're now available on an open access basis.
John:But every now and again, there's update with people they missed for us. I realized there was no biography available. Very good. And one thing real I found that using the resource in that loan library was Mhmm. Vitally important for.
John:I figured, I pitched them, look. This this guy is important. You know? His significance. You know?
John:Because after he, after his career in the Irish Volunteers because he because he was born in Argentina, the British Deport of Argentina. Okay. But before he left, he was apparently topped up by Michael Collins and said, you know, the way you're going to Argentina, well, we could we could do with somebody in Argentina, you know. Before he was I think before he was before, he won the off his horror championship. So horror championship as well.
John:Because he won the the Sykes and Coke, the Fitzgibbon Cup, you know. A very TV. Very TV. Yeah. But he ended up as basically representative of the Irish Republic in Argentina Okay.
John:With the more well known Lawrence Gonell, you know Yes. Has a knowledge of people. Here. Exactly. But the point to say, like, say the point to make would be, you know, the resources in the local studies collection in that Loam library Mhmm.
John:Was vitally important because I opened out some of the things around both. And the fact that there was such a diaspora from this part of the midlands Yeah. To Argentina in the 19th century, you know? Yeah. So, you know, you can I think obviously, you know, you you do the history needs to you need the tension between local and the local and the national, you know?
John:Yeah. And
Lorna:I think the gap between the two has lessened sort of
John:as well. Hasn't sure. The lessened public libraries are they're they're a huge part of that.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:You know, and again, the the range of resources available in the public library. I mean, so, like, we would do I like, we're we're out in our stuff. We're across the road of chemistry public Library. We're physically based on commercial archives. We'd find ourselves lying on the relying on the the library now.
John:Public
Lorna:library. Yeah.
John:Time, you know, for database and things if you need something checked. You know? So I don't think you can underestimate the value Yeah. Of the public library system, because it it's a democratic system. You know?
John:It's accessible to all.
Lorna:Yeah.
John:And I think as someone who's gonna navigate my way through a couple of different different careers in history, one thing that have the same, I always find myself coming back to the libraries.
Lorna:Wow. That's good to hear.
John:As an undergraduate born of course here, they're more likely in a professional capacity making use of it in other ways. Mhmm. But if I can make use of it, everyone can because a library cars, you know, the resources available in the library system are they're, you know, streets ahead of what was there 20, 25 years old. Yeah. So they meant the research that can do, and technology is a broadened the base of that.
John:But I mean, if this sounds like an extended plug for the public life, is it? It is. Because it's an it's an extraordinary resource and one that I think is a very an exceptionally valuable resource in Irish life, you know? So, you know, put it this way, I've used it probably for most of my working career history. And however long that may be, I'll probably keep using that.
John:You know? If we live long enough, we may actually be picking this up until I begin my retirement. That's another that's a that's a offer. Another thing I'd ask.
Lorna:Podcast, John. Thank you so much for joining us today.
John:No. Thanks for having me.
Lorna:It's great to hear how we could be of benefit to somebody like yourself. So
John:Keep it up.
Lorna:Thanks very much,
John:John. Thank you,
Lorna:Thanks to John and Lorna for the informative and entertaining talk.
John:And thank
Lorna:you to all those who took part in our Past Perspectives podcast. This is the last episode in our current season. I hope you enjoyed it. If you are a local historian or working with Westmead history and would like to be interviewed for our 2nd season, please get in touch by emailing us, library at westmeadcoco.ie. This has been Past Perspectives, a Westmead Libraries podcast.