On 12 September 2000, the custody of sixty seven of Ireland’s most precious Gaelic manuscripts was transferred from the Franciscan Library Killiney to the Archives Department, University College Dublin. This transfer represented the first stage in the realisation of an agreement signed between Dr Art Cosgrove, the College President, and Fr. Ulic Troy, Minister Provincial of the Franciscan Province of Ireland, two months earlier. The university and the friars have concluded this landmark agreement to offer a new home for the manuscripts, to conserve them, and then make available to scholars in particular and the public in general some of the country’s most significant cultural treasures.

The relocation of the manuscripts was the latest stage in a journey which now spans four centuries and many different countries, one of the jewels of the collection being the manuscript of the famous Annals of the Four Masters. In the 1620s, Brother Michéal Ó Cléirigh and his associates began a mammoth task of copying and collating medieval annals and manuscripts which were in serious danger of being lost forever. The Annals written in Ó Cléirigh’s exquisite and distinctive hand were just one part of a bid by Irish Franciscans based at Louvain to collect and publish editions of the lives of the Irish saints. They found themselves moving far beyond their original task and ended by producing not only hagiography but also history and genealogy. The result of all of this effort ‘do chum glóir Dé agus onóra na hÉirinn’ was the forging of an image of Ireland as the land of saints and scholars. Over time this potent image has fed into and had an effect upon virtually all subsequent definitions of Ireland and of Irishness.

The first priority of the UCD-OFM. partnership is to stabilise the more vulnerable vellum and paper manuscripts and then proceed to making security microfilm of the entire collection.. As the conservation of the manuscripts is completed, exciting new possibilities for access and dissemination will open up. In parallel with traditional preservation of the manuscripts the partnership is committed to a digitisation programme which will allow transmission of images across the internet to make the immense riches of the collection available to all.

Ms A3 is a fragment of the Book of Leinster known as the ‘Martyrology of Tallaght’ which is a 900 year old list of saints and their feast days.

Ms A13 These images from the Annals of the Four Masters depict the genealogy composed as a present for their patron O’Gara (ff 21r & v), the signature page with the names of the annalists inscribed (fol 23r) and the entry for 432 AD, the traditional date for the arrival of St. Patrick in Ireland.
ff 21r & v	fol 23r	Entry for 432AD

Ms A14 Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn attempted in the wake of 17th century conquest and plantation to bury old divisions through a new depiction of Ireland as a united, Catholic kingdom, destined to take its place among the nations of the earth.

Ms A30 is a letter written for Rosa O’Doherty and is also a rare example of the signature of a Gaelic Irishwoman.

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