ARA Ireland and our Ambassadorial tradition.

ARA Ireland’s Communications and Campaigns Officer, Niamh Ní Charra, writes in this guest blog about the ambassadorial tradition that has become established as part of the annual Explore Your Archive campaign in Ireland.

For over two decades ARA Ireland has been enthusiastically embracing the annual Explore Your Archive campaign with gusto. From the very start of what was formerly known as the “Archives Awareness” campaign, the committee realised that reaching out to the general public, promoting our work and our collections and emphasising the welcome waiting for all, needed to be the message at the heart of the campaign.

To that end, ARA Ireland began a tradition 18 years ago of inviting a carefully selected public persona to become the ARA Ireland EYA ambassador each year. These ambassadors have attended our annual campaign launches, spoken of their own experiences with and love for archives, and have given the campaign a public face. Previous ambassadors have included radio and television presenter Ryan Tubridy, now presenting alongside Chris Evans on Virgin Radio following 14 years on Irish chat show The Late Late Show (the world’s longest running live chat show), London-based Emma Dabiri, academic, broadcaster, and author of ‘Don’t touch my hair’ a ground-breaking book on the history of Black hair and why it matters and Senator David Norris, scholar, civil rights activist and the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in Ireland.

We are thrilled that ARA Ireland's Explore Your Archive ambassador for 2023/24 is journalist and author Clodagh Finn. Clodagh is author of ‘Through Her Eyes: a history of Ireland in 21 women’ and ‘A Time to Risk All’ (Gill Books), a biography of Mary Elmes, the “Irish Oskar Schindler”. Last year, she collaborated with the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Alison Gilliland, to write ‘Her Keys to the City’, which highlights the overlooked contributions of 80 women. She writes 'An Irishwoman’s Diary' in the Irish Examiner and has worked as a sub-editor and feature writer for several newspapers. She has also worked as a freelance writer and editor in Paris, has a degree in French and Archaeology from University College Dublin (UCD) and is particularly interested in writing about overlooked women from history.

Another feature of ARA Ireland’s campaign is our annual launch on the Thursday preceding the focus-week. This evening has become an important social event in the archives calendar bringing colleagues together from all corners of the island of Ireland for an evening of networking, socialising and celebrating our profession. It is at this event that our ambassador is introduced in person, and has the task of officially launching our annual campaign. It is also at this event that we take the opportunity to welcome students of the MA in Archives and Records Management course in UCD to our profession, and take the opportunity to encourage a spirit of openness and professional collegiality.

The venue itself is also carefully chosen. This year, our focus-week launch took place in the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) in the heart of Dublin City. In our profession, it is common for the national institutions and universities to get the lion’s share of the public’s attention, and frankly our own. One of the benefits of the EYA campaign, however, is that individual professionals working all over the country often on their own, as well as the teams of archivists, records managers and conservators working in the aforementioned institutions, all have an equal opportunity to share their work and items from their collections. This includes subject-specific archives, such as ITMA - well known to those with an interest in the subject itself, but perhaps less familiar to those outside of these circles - which get a real opportunity to share their important and specialised work to both the public and our profession.

ARA Ireland's Communications and Campaigns Officer Niamh Ní Charra (right) with EYA ambassador for 2023/24 Clodagh Finn. Photo (c) Marc O'Sullivan and taken at the Royal Irish Academy

This year’s EYA launch, the 10th since the campaign was rebranded, was a tremendous success. This was despite the drama which was unfolding on the other side of Dublin city which saw riots in the Irish capital for the first time in four decades. Thankfully we all made it home safely, including those travelling from across the water, and the rioters failed to dampen our EYA enthusiasm. The subsequent focus-week was also hugely successful and received wonderful coverage in national and provincial press. This included an Irish language article in the Irish Times based on an interview with Communications and Campaigns Officer Niamh Ní Charra, and a column by our ambassador, Clodagh Finn, in the Irish Examiner, in which she eloquently summed up the irony of the dramatic events in Dublin:

“While one group of people was rioting in Dublin, intent on tearing the city down, another group of people had gathered in (ITMA) on the other side of the city to talk about preserving what we hold dear.”

In a double irony, material relating to Dublin riots will no doubt make its way into an archive too, perhaps to be discovered in some future campaign!