The story of the Ó Fiaich Library
The library is named for Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich (1923-1990), the Armagh-born churchman and historian who served as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland before being made a cardinal in 1979. A lifelong scholar of Irish history and a champion of the Irish language, he left behind extensive academic and personal papers that form one of the collection's three founding archives.
The library opened in May 1999, built high on Cathedral Hill to the rear of the Roman Catholic St Patrick's Cathedral. It was established to commemorate the cardinal and to carry forward the cultural and academic interests he had spent his life promoting: Irish language and literature, local and ecclesiastical history, the Irish abroad, and Gaelic games. A full-time librarian was appointed in February 2000.
The collections grew quickly. Alongside the cardinal's own papers, the archive took in the records of the Archdiocese of Armagh, including correspondence dating back to the late eighteenth century, and research material on Irish families in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe donated by the Kerney Walsh family. Today the holdings run to around 40,000 published volumes, 450 periodical titles and close to a million archive documents along nearly a kilometre of shelving.
Run as an independent charitable trust, the library remains a free public reference resource and one of the most significant specialist archives on the island, covering the Catholic Church, partition, the War of Independence and the wider history of Ireland.