Ciara Breathnach, "Absence in the Archives" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

0:00Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello and welcome to new Books Network. My name is Aiden Bede and one of the co-hosts of this channel. Today we're talking to Professor Kira Brannock, Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Corp. Professor Brannock has published widely on Irish socioeconomic, gender, cultural and health history and her last monograph, Ordinary Lives, Death at Social Class, Dublin City, Coroners Court, 1876 to 1902, won the American Conference of Irish Studies, James S. Donnelly Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences. For most recent book is Absence in the Archives, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2026 and that's the book we'll be talking about today. Professor Brannock, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my work and for engaging with it and I know how busy you are, so many things. No, but happy to do it. So maybe if we start with the very basic problem that your book is addressing, probably all historians

1:01in some way or another are familiar with the problems of silence and absence in the very broadest sense. You go to study a thing, you realize that the archival material doesn't exist or it was destroyed or it's not available to you. One of the things you talk about is what you call a constructed absence. Could you maybe start by telling us what you mean by that? Well, I would start off by saying that we need to, in the first instance, create distinctions between silence and absence in the archives and I found that when I set about writing this book that I had to think very carefully about both concepts. So silence in the archives is fairly well described and it has been the subject of a lot of scholarship, particularly by our colleagues who work on kind of new world history of colonialism, slavery and all of that. But I think that as a historian of Ireland, like yourself, were very well used to absence

2:02and it's a different kind of problem. And all my career I worked on the history of poor and disenfranchised people, so I expected silence about them. But absence is a very different problem because it means there's absolutely nothing there whatsoever to base your work on. And then I started thinking around how this kind of phenomenon, if you will, is orchestrated either by states, by local authorities, by colonial entities, by power brokers in general. And I think that I was writing this following a couple of decades of my own research in terms of Irish social, economic, cultural and health history, but also from the perspective of my students and what they need to be more aware of when they embark on their studies, I've supervised a lot of masters and PhDs at this stage. And I think that particularly when you look at the history of Ireland, you're dealing in

3:06many respects with scraps. So it's again, how do you theorize around these scraps? How do you actually create something new in terms of knowledge from very disparate sources, located and dispersed in many different archives? And I think that from an Irish historian's perspective, we need more sophisticated theoretical frameworks with which to view the scraps that we deal with in terms of our primary sources. So I then, after a while, and I think very much helped by, I have to sing the praises of Professor Daniel Wolf, who's the series editor, and my reviewers, who really forced me to think in broader terms and outside of Ireland more generally as to how we can approach patchy historical records and patchy archival sources. And then I, it led me down a road of what I'm terming constructed absence.

4:10It's where record sets fall outside of legislation, for example, at the very most basic kind of premise. So for example, like the Irish National Archives Act is grudgesly outdated. We've had several commissions of inquiry into abuse over the last couple of decades. And I think that there's an expectation on the part of the public that the records are there somewhere, and very often they're not, because either A, they haven't survived, they're located in probably buildings that were never built to house archives in the first instance. But at a more fundamental level, they're not covered by any legislation. And that's deeply problematic. And that, to my mind, actually contributes to the problem of constructed absence. That's where you have legislators or record owners who are abdicating the responsibility to make themselves accountable to citizens.

5:11So we would expect that public records at a national level or at a state level should be in a national archive. And then that local authority archives would be in local authority archives or state archives as a case may be in the United States. But not everything can be kept. So then we have to consider every juncture at which a record can go missing. And sometimes that's legally mandated. And I think we have a particular problem at the moment with the legislation associated with privacy and the present encroaching on the integrity of historical records. So I'm very worried, Aiden, to be honest with you. Sure, sure. How do I put the state of things? So you mentioned, and I fundamentally agree with you that one of the things that we need to do as we think through this as scholars is to think about who else is thinking about

6:12this, who else is doing work on this. We need to step outside of the island of Ireland. Who are the people that you think with? Who are the people whose ideas you draw on to think about these issues of archival absence? I think that in the first instance, this book is very much based on the work of Michel Roff Trulow and his son in the past, which I would consider fundamental reading for all students of history. And for anybody who teaches history more generally, he identified ways in which very important matters can be silenced by almost like state-driven histories or ideologically-driven histories or the histories of colonialism. And he used two examples, that of the Haitian revolt, the slave revolt, from 1791 to 1804 against French imperialism, which he found didn't exist in terms of the broader historiography.

7:20So he sought to revisit that matter and tell the history of that revolt. And also he used the example of Columbus' discovery of America and how that history is told and used those as case studies to exemplify the ways in which silence can become embedded. And in that, he developed a kind of a four-step mechanism whereby silence is kind of embedded in the first instance and the source creation whereby the person who's actually taking down the record leaves out the important points or stuff that doesn't suit the narrative of, I think in this volume, I used the idea of minutes of a meeting, whether or not the secretary records the records or the proceedings of a committee meeting. And the second point of which silence can be embedded is in archive creation.

8:24And at that point, to my mind, I'll come back to this so that the framework is values. So the second point is in archive creation. The fourth point is in the historical research process, which both you and I would be engaged with. And in the fourth stage, then, the fourth moment of silence is in history-making. And that is where he identified the retrospective significance. So I think that provided the groundwork, the kind of grounding framework for myself. And then I started looking at who are the people who are involved in each of those stages. And then on top of that, then, I started looking at the work of our colleagues in archivistics. And in particular, work by Laura and Stolar and Terry Cook. And the stages, and first of all, Stolar's work on silence and the importance of reading

9:26against the archival grain is a central part of her hypothesis. And then I used Terry Cook's development of the field of archives. And he divided it into four distinct stages of juridical legacy, to cultural memory, to societal engagement, to community archiving. So he used a chronological approach to the development of the archival silences, to kind of put a little bit of order on how we should think around archives themselves as institutions. And I think broadly defined, most democracies can look to cook, to identify the way in which their own national archives developed. We certainly can apply that to Ireland, for example. They can be applied to the UK, can be applied to France as well, to the Netherlands, and

10:26several other countries. So I've used, I suppose, I've borrowed from a couple of different theoreticians, primarily Michel Roff Trudeau with regards to the historical sciences, and then to use Cook's work, lured on top of that from archivistics to create new frameworks, with which to identify absence in the archives. So maybe if we move from these theoretical considerations or the kinds of ideas you're drawing on, how does this actually then manifest itself in Ireland itself? Could you tell us about maybe the long history first of all of the creation of a state paper in Britain? I was quite surprised reading your book that the state paper's archive in Britain is actually quite old. I would have assumed it was a much later creation. So we have this model of archiving state documents. It doesn't seem to follow that path in Ireland.

11:27How does Ireland and Northern Ireland, like how did the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland differ from Britain when a state archive is created there? So the state paper's office, I think we probably need to differentiate here between state papers and public records. There are two very different things, public records, I suppose, we can think of as documents that are in the public domain and that we are free to use, like, say, records of the courts, for example, after a certain period of time. State papers are probably a little bit more confidential and it's at the, I think the kind of a haller, put it, the prerogative of the state as to what it should release into the public domain. And very often we can find papers that are considered too sensitive or perhaps maybe pose a risk to national security that could never be released. And so there's a difference there. That's a broad, broad, broad stroke.

12:29Coming back to the establishment of state papers in the UK, as you hardly say, it's quite old. And there has been quite a lot of research on it. And Nicholas Popper's work, for example, the spectrum of the archives is a recent fantastic tone on that. The Irish state papers probably, they come a bit later, so that's where the beginning of the 18th century and there have been efforts to organize the records of the Irish state in the late, in the late 17th century. But they failed basically because effectively what happens with the maintenance of records is a whole architecture of responsibility and accountability. And you have some very powerful people not wanting to have certain records in the public

13:30domain. But as the British Empire grew, there was a growing need to create mechanisms to make records more accessible and to move them into centralized locations away from the threat of vermin, fire, damp, and the usual vectors that can lead to the deterioration of various different types of documents. And you have to remember as well, the materiality of archives is something that we have to take into consideration here. So some of those early state papers were, you know, rolls of vellum or rag paper. And then as modern paper comes into the free wood pulp paper, whatever comes into the free later on, they all have different types of vulnerabilities. So I think that I'll discuss how some really important state papers, paid goals and legislation,

14:31agreements, international agreements were held in old kitchens or in beside magazines. So it's quite incredible that really that a lot of things survived the appalling treatment in the past. But the people who had access to these terrible locations were often paid for access to them. So if you had a lot of money, you could afford to get access to records that might actually help your case in court, for example. So that meant that some people were very much disenfranchised by the level of access that there was in terms of state papers or public records to a lesser extent in Britain, up until the 19th century. And at that point then we see the emergence of modern archivistics in Britain. First of all, a bit of legislation in 1838, which establishes the public records office.

15:36And that puts great order on things, it centralises things into a particular building. And unfortunately, what's built, what's promised is not large enough to store all the massed records over a couple of years, sorry, a couple of years to hear me, a couple of centuries of Emperor at that point. So that happens in 1838. So we have a framework of public record, piece of legislation and then the idea of building a building large enough to house the records in the UK in 1838. That framework is kind of larger use for Ireland in 1867. And again, we've learned from no mistakes here. What's built is not large enough to hold the amount of records that have been amassed over the previous few centuries.

16:37So that's where you get the idea of woodling things down. And sadly, a lot of records being destroyed in the process. And why there was a, sorry, just there's a mandate to destroy records in 1877 in the UK. That's not extended elsewhere. Sorry, go ahead, my question. No, I mean, I was going to ask, is Ireland a fairly typical colonial case then? Does Ireland compare quite neatly with places like India in terms of how archival materials being treated? Not really. At all, because there's, you got to think as well about the vulnerability of archives. We don't have to think of termites, for example, in Ireland and heat as a problem for record deterioration. In a tempered climate, you have other threats to archives in terms of damp and other kinds of warfare, if you will. Under course, the religious situation as well in Ireland or sectarianism and ones, another

17:39big issue, because of course all the churches were repositories in their own right. So we have a long tradition of poor care of archives in Ireland and fires, not just in the public records office in 1922, but also in court houses. The court records were destroyed in 1991, for example. So there's a long history of very poor management, if you will, and warfully inadequate storage in Ireland. So I don't think you can compare both because both colonial settings are very, very different. The East India office, as you know, was established in Walchart, in 1600. And that is the main kind of record holder in India up until the revolution in 1857.

18:42And after that, after the rebellion of 1857, the governance of the records is transferred from the East India office, East India company to the crown. And that then, so what you have is literally a clutch of imperial outposts that also happened to be repositories for records of the East India company. And then those become offices of the crown thereafter. So it's a really different problem. And you're talking about the distance as well between India and London. And I think that I have to have to have a short on a joke of going into the British Library a couple of years ago when it was, you know, had suffered that awful cyber attack. And I went into the Asian studies room and it was full of scholars from coming from all

19:44over the globe to work on their, on, on Asian history. And at the time, you were only allowed six items and I ordered up something that was a dud. And, and it was fine for me, you know, coming over from Ireland and inconvenience nonetheless. And it was for the entire complex. So you had six, six records. And mine ended up being a one-pager. Well, I think it was some, you know, some kind of worries about the Irish and the Indians colluding on something. And, and it ended up being a dud. But I could have forward that hit if you will. But I think that my heart went out to the room for the scholars who were there that day. And the great effort that they have to go to to access records that should rightfully be, be in whole available to them in, in the National Archives in India.

20:45I mean, the, the National Archives in, is, is establishing India in 1891. And every time you have a new repository established, the amount that goes missing along the way is extraordinary. So if you move records, you're, you're going to find displacement and misplacement of archives in that process as well. So a lot of what you're talking about here, you know, as I said at the very start, like these questions are, you know, very familiar, insert in different ways to every historian. But I, I've come across a thing in my own work where, because I've done some work on Israeli history, you have this curious problem where, I mean, a number of different problems where, at the end of British rule in Palestine in 1948, the British just abandoned some documents and leave them behind in what is going to become the state of Israel and also the occupied territories later on. And so you end up with some documents that come under Israeli control, including documents related to Palestinian history, which then are inaccessible to Palestinians.

21:47But also the British, when they leave, take a lot of stuff with them. And there's a very tragic kind of story that happens where the ships are actually, the sailors bringing stuff back to Britain, realize the ships are overloaded. And so they just start dumping archival documents over into the Mediterranean. And so a lot of stuff, they may kind of snap decisions about what needs to be kept, what doesn't need to be kept. And often the stuff that a social historian will be really interested in, they just throw out, you know, things like, you know, applications for gun license, applications for driver's license, that would have given you an insight into everyday life in Palestine. And we have this very famous, almost in similar problem in Ireland, which you've kind of alluded to a certain time with the fire in the four courts and the destruction of archives there, where during the Irish Civil War, as you know, documents get destroyed when the building gets burnt down. Is that an aberration? Or do you see that as something that is part of this general history of absence, of loss,

22:50of destruction, of things just disappearing? Oh, goodness. I think you know the answer. And it's going to begin with Sadri. Yeah, it's a farmer or common that we think there was a report done by UNESCO back in 1996. Rather pointedly, just shortly after the genocide in Rwanda. And that report, it's so basically, it's surveyed libraries and archives and asked them to submit a little bit of a kind of a list, basically, of their losses over the 20th century alone, just the 20th century. The 6,250 archives, over 105 different countries responded to the surveys. It's funny enough, Ireland's not in there, but 96% of them suffered losses.

23:51Wow. I'm like ranging from some to complete destruction. So it is, I really do think that we need to do, UNESCO needs to do another follow-up survey, because I think it would be very disturbing to learn the degree of loss of sense. And you know, I'm really quite interested in what you're talking about there in terms of your own work. And the dumping of things considered unimportant. I really do think that we need a conversation that includes the public as to what can be included, because the idea of the total archive, Jacques D'Arre, D'Arre does a notion, I'm just discussed in archive fever, it's a pipe dream. We have to be ruthless here. We can't keep everything. It would be wonderful if we could, but we can't. So like those wonderful bits that you can pick up from, you know, as you were saying, their driver's licenses.

24:52I mean, that's a hugely interesting social indicator of mobility, for example, or the foundation of new occupations. It tells us so much about the everyday, the stuff that you and I are very interested in. And the political and military historians might not be so interested in. But I think that there is any time that has gone out to the people to the side as to what they want to keep, the people have overwhelmingly come back to say, keep as much as we can. And I think that when it comes to things like restorative justice, well, I understand that it's difficult to keep everybody happy and that there are issues of national security. I mean, the fact that some things are retrospectively, are they recalled for state purposes or made secrets is, I think it's a,

25:53where are the states where it's untenable now? There needs to be more transparency about what's kept and what's made accessible to the broader public. You know, more than most, we have a very troubled past in Ireland. And the abuse scandals of the 20th century in particular, I think, there's a lot more questions to be answered all night. And there's still a lot of secrecy around records. They're full extent as to whether or not that they're made accessible. And I'm talking now about records of Magdalena Salems of industrial, industrial schools of reformatries of, obviously, the mother of baby institutions more recently orphanages, the history of psychiatry in Ireland as well. We have we have on equal and on even access to records. So we need proper policy mechanisms put in place as to ethical and responsible

26:56access to records, but also at a very fundamental level, we need to make sure that they're protected and that they follow there's some kind of legislation in the first instance. So the National Archives Act is a grudgesly outdated. It has a very limited schedule. So it means that a lot of very sensitive records are falling outside of legislation. So we need to make sure that records are protected in the first instance. So it does seem like there's a whole set of problems here that your book is identifying and talking about some of which are quite basic problems about termites, moisture, rats, storage. And then some really big high level political problems like documents that discuss quite sensitive topics that the government doesn't want you to know about or the degree to which private institutions can destroy their records or private individuals could destroy their records because they don't want the truth about them to come out. And there does seem to be a sense that computers or digital tools can solve all

28:01these problems. And I'm assuming you would say no. So how do we solve these problems? Like what is the solution if there's going to be new legislation? What do you think it should look like? Well, first of all, digitization opposes a whole host of other problems. So we need to again, we need to divide digitization into the made and the born digital. The made digital have a whole host of problems associated with them. Stuff that might have been digitized in the late 90s, early noties is not migratable now. And we need to make a decision. Well, I say we, in the royal sense, archivists and digital librarians need to make decisions as to what's worth keeping, what's worth re-digitizing, what's worth migrating, and you know, that'll cost money. So all of this requires proper investment. So on top of that then we have the born digital. The born digital is everything from your emails to

29:04our podcast here today. And whether or not a hen again, there's a big conversation to be had here about our environmental footprint as historians and how we digitize and where it's stored and you know how it's backed up. We might be using very stiffer and scanning devices in our phones. I'm very conscious of that now. I'm very conscious of the digital footprint I leave myself and the environmental impact that that has. So I don't think that digitization can solve everything. I mentioned email there is like what about the earliest emails that you know that were that that government departments used. I mean that does up along to each government department. Does it belong to the internet? Sorry, the provider. So who the big tech has an enormous stake in that kind of digital record. So the born digital is another matter. It's so easily manipulatable as we know.

30:08Our archives and our covis and historians are going to need to have a huge range of new skills to combat the problems of authenticating records and of interrogating, for in some way interrogating digital records in future. I'm not an expert here until old and I leave that to younger people. But I am interested and I certainly would like to have that skill set and I certainly would but in order for those things to emerge in terms of continuing professional development, we need archives to go online. We need the born digital archives to go online. And what has been placed online and sadly the US was very much to the fore in terms of the born the placing born digital archives online and that has changed over the last few years for political reasons. I surveyed a number of different European national archives and of course as well

31:13the distinction of national archives and national libraries does is not universal either some national libraries function as national archives. But I surveyed directors of various different repositories around Europe. I didn't include it in the book for lots of reasons because it was kind of people were I think embarrassed about the state of the born digital and I didn't want to cause further embarrassment by naming and shaming people because it's not the fault of directors or keepers of national archives that they they have been underfunded and under resourced over several decades. This is nothing new here by the way, this under resourcing. But I think that engaging with the born digital has been beyond the resources. So they're grappling with the paper record, the the made digital and what they do with that. And a lot for the made digital as well by the way is functionally kind of useless because it's not machine readable. So that's another issue too.

32:20And then the born digital I think is just beyond the scope because it's it's a deluge. And and and again we're going to have an awful lot of last time that too for lots of practical reasons. I mean as you were talking I took a quick sneak peek at my email inbox and I worked at my university now for three years and at the bottom of my account I said I have 12,000 emails. And I mean if you I mean that the word deluge I think is quite appropriate. I mean if I if I was an actually important person how many emails must I have if I was a president or a prime minister. I mean the the level of documentation here and the solutions that will be needed to to preserve everything must be immense and incredibly environmentally dangerous. Is there a solution to this that is that can sort of tick all those boxes about preservation of the documents plus preservation of just the earth? Well I think that I think first of all we all need to practice good data management and

33:21be data hygiene ourselves. You need to don't pass those and you are here supporting to course where and but again what's happening over the last kind of two decades is that of course government departments have their own records managers they have to and and and they will occasionally weed stuff that needs to go and there is a retention and disposal schedule for all government departments. But in that there's a lot that's destroyed and that the public will never become aware of and I think that there needs to be more transparency in that you know the public should have a say on what future histories are going to look like and on what what artifacts are preserved in terms of the past and that that's not happening. So there's an awful lot of records management and that the handover process that happens naturally between government departments and and national

34:24archives that happens every 2030 50 70 years depends on the record the individual the the original record type itself and the governing legislation. What we're seeing now in Ireland for example more and more government departments employing really really skilled archivists which is very heartening what it should have been happening 30 40 50 years ago it should have been happening over very long time and in fact the Irish legislation doesn't change from 1867 until 1986. So there's a kind of a role over and you mentioned there and some really important points when when empires end when when regimes end and there is regime change and there's a north a lot of disarray that happens but very often the kind of colonial record keeping practices

35:25continue in the new administration and that certainly happened in Ireland up until the current act of 1986 which is it's it's it's too perfunctory and our local archives have a paragraph in local local local government legislation from 1994 I think and that's not enough and I think that our archivists need better protections better legal protections themselves and as you're you're probably very very very well aware local authority archives usually is one person has now been off when you consider the amount of administration that is the comes out of local authority archives and you mentioned motor you know licenses for driving cars like motor taxation for example is another big function of local authorities and it generates huge amounts of records on an annual basis which would be fascinating for historians in a hundred years time if for

36:29example we needed a proxy for missing census returns and like having a car or buying a car is like a right to passage for several young people and I think it would make for a fierce interesting study and in in future years but we can't keep everything so there needs to be I think more honest and transparent and conversations both this so maybe if we can cut a wrap up as you look to the future for yourself and maybe also just for Irish history writing more generally how much do you think these questions about absence are going to inform and determine what you do next what I what I'm what I'm what I'm it's like the Confuciar here what I've done and what I failed to do I think that you know as a historian of Ireland anytime I've done work in say American archives I'm always flabbergasted or in the UK for example at complete runs of records because I work on the poor and the very poor and very much disenfranchised people who are rarely documented and my last book was

37:32on and the coroner's court in Dublin which is the poorest of the poor in our society they die in sudden and unexpected circumstances purely because of because of their living environment their working environment and where they're positioned on the social radiant and I wrapped it around said the 1901 census I couldn't do the same for the 1911 census because it was only there was only like 15 full inquest reports for that for that year and for the 1901 census I had I could wrap 611 cases around that year so that gives you an idea of otherwise very poorly documented people and when I looked very closely at those records I did a very close reading of them I found several people who were mentioned in New Orleans so the first record of them having ever lived was the record of their death and and it's actually quite sobering to think of that and to think that in

38:35the very recent past and the way the way which say power and the way we think about power in Ireland is by the case of between church and state that if parish records don't exist there's probably no civil records of a lot of people either so where am I going in future I'm currently working on records I'm currently working on an article on the dead from institutions in Ireland and in the 20th century and again it's looking at how we can trust those civil registration records of death for example so I will always be invested in looking at poorer people and on the social history of ordinary lives so absence will always be a problem for me and silence will always be a problem for me and what I'm looking forward to doing is maybe applying the theoretical framework that I put together for access in the archives and using it to put some order on on the disorder

39:42of some of the records that I have to deal with in my work and my future work will be looking at the social gradient and social inequalities of health and what the past can do to inform the present in terms of social inequality because I think that particularly for those of us who work on the history of social welfare there's often a very a very begrudging attitude towards the very poor and say people who suffer from mental health problems or addiction or new migrants to a country that they're very easy to use escape goals in lots of ways but as you know yourself Aden you know it's often very far from the truth and I think that disadvantage is a very long history and it's something that people forget very quickly so we have a remarkable kind of human

40:43I don't know what are it's a survival tactic really to forget and we very quickly forget say the aftermath of things like or the experience of say the global pandemic I mean there were several pandemics in the past and epidemics in the past would access mortality that we very quickly forgot and I think it's it's incumbent and also as historians of health and welfare and ordinary lies to remind people however uncomfortable it might make them feel that there are elements of the past that we need to sit with and we need to actually interrogate more and that's where I think absences are is a real problem and and that's where the work of colleagues in of the new world history say of the of the Caribbean of our colleagues in India of the Vaini Raman there are too many to mention here a parna ballashandran

41:45Joanna Balkan Rakesh Ankesh and of course Karla and Elkins are really quite important here so my work builds on the shoulders are very enormous giants actually and what I'd really love to see actually is and it's not a methodologically very difficult is more collaboration in terms of transnational histories and because I don't think global history is the same thing global history you know can't achieve what we need to do in terms of say looking at commonalities across different countries and how we can reconcile difficult paths and particularly in countries that have colonial paths and I think that post colonial history hasn't been and mind to the extent it could be well as all of this I think really shows very clearly absences in the archives is it's a very short book but it's a really provocative book that is raising a lot of very important questions

42:47yes so that's the structure of the the element stories with Cambridge University Press and it was enormously challenging to fit everything in and I didn't fit everything in so what it is is the pilot study for further study to be honest with the aid well I mean I've always felt what I like about those kind of series is they do really address a very different problem I think probably all academics are aware of when you've written something that's too long to be a paper but too short to be a conventional monograph I really like that those those kinds of series exist to have like a 40,000 or 50,000 bird book either case I thought it was a very useful book and I'm grateful for you for having this great conversation with us thank you very much for your time Aiden and and you should you should do you should do one you're you're the perfect candidate to write on very tricky topics and yeah definitely Aiden and thank you so much for your time today

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