Letters to the Editor

A matter of record

THE destruction of Ireland’s architectural and cultural heritage (‘) reached a new pitch during the Irish Civil War, starting with the siege of the Four Courts as troops of the emerging state tried to dislodge anti-treaty forces. In 1922, a mine was triggered and the Four Courts and the Public Record Office were blown up,). The new provisional government paused hostilities to call on citizens to return any scraps of paper, no matter how charred or damaged. Not a great deal was saved. One of the architects of the new Irish state was Churchill, who summed up the situation neatly: ‘Better a country without a library than a library without a country.’