A Century of Recovery – and Beyond - Marking the centenary of the Four Courts fire (1922) and the launch of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

9 As an all-island and international initiative, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland draws strength from partnerships which now link the Core Partners with an expanding consortium of over 70 institutions in Ireland, Britain, Europe, North America and Australia. At a national level, the programme’s widening participation includes cultural institutions and archival repositories across the State, Public and Higher Education sectors. The relationships are equally vibrant at a local level across the island. As Dr Maurice Manning, Chair of the Expert Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations, has noted: ‘local cultural organisations and the library network have a significant role to offer as “cultural brokers”, managing conversations and building relationships, and engaging communities in a meaningful way’. Beyond 2022 has formed an active collaboration with Local Government Archivists and Record Managers, representing 19 county councils, as well as with many City and County Council Library services and other repositories. This collaboration on historical local government records also includes The Northern Ireland Library Authority (Libraries NI). In the United States of America, key partners include the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library California, Boston College, Columbia University, Harvard, the Library Company of Philadelphia, The J.P. Morgan Library in New York, the University of Chicago and Yale Library. In Britain, partners include the British Library, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library, the Parliamentary Archives of the UK Houses of Parliament, and the University of Bristol. In 2022 we were delighted to welcome the National Library of Australia as a partner. Our research also addresses a global challenge—how to recover from cultural loss. From 2018–21, Beyond 2022 was privileged to coordinate the Trinity Long Room Hub’s multi-annual lecture series, Out of the Ashes: Collective Memory, Cultural Loss and Recovery. The series set Ireland’s national archival tragedy of 1922 in the broadest possible contexts. Speakers from five continents explored the theme of cultural loss and recovery across the centuries, from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in antiquity to contemporary acts of cultural loss and destruction, and the ongoing vulnerability of digital archives. Expanding beyond virtual recreation, our Decade of Centenaries Artist in Residence offers a creative response to the Four Courts blaze, inspiring new forms of imaginative engagement with challenging historical events and cultural destruction. Public interest in, and appetite for, archives and historical information has been one of the remarkable outcomes of the Decade of Centenaries programme. Through the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland anyone interested in Irish history at home and abroad can now re-enter the Record Treasury destroyed one hundred years ago. We invite Edward I of England from Westminster Abbey (by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster).