PRESIDENT MARY McAleese has warned against what she described as a common practice of "ransacking the past for edited highlights with which to distort history".
Speaking at the inauguration of the Archive and Research Centre in Castletown House, Co Kildare, yesterday, she said the facility would give us the chance "to have the stories of the past probed deeply and told accurately".
The archive has recently been refurbished by the OPW, and is run by the Modern History Department at NUI Maynooth. It contains documents dealing with the history of Irish estates, their houses and inhabitants.
Head of the department Prof Vincent Comerford said it was hoped that the centre would be open to members of the public with a scholarly intent by early next summer.
In a speech to mark the inauguration, the President said:"Our present is full of very telling reminders of the very long shelf-life of toxic seeds generated by oppression, conflict, sectarianism, plantation, colonisation and famine.
"We have worked hard in this generation to clear away as many as possible of the debilitating weeds produced by that toxic harvest. Ransacking the past for edited highlights with which to distort history has been commonplace and damaging but in a thorough and scholarly archive such as this we have a chance to have the stories of the past probed deeply and told accurately."
She said she felt "the seed sown here is part of the new landscape we are trying to nurture to a much healthier and better harvest, an island comfortable with its uncomfortable past, no longer held back by the divisions it caused but energised by the partnerships that flourish among its richly diverse people."
She said that "the old days of them and us in which so much energy and hope was wasted along those formidable demarcation lines of Catholic and Protestant, of landlord and tenant, of Irish and Anglo, have manifestly begun to give way to a shared purpose and shared identity as shapers of a shared future."
The archive would "surely help us to grow that shared future underpinned by curiosity about the truth, about all of who and what we were and are and this lovely place in which to pursue it."
She recalled that "this was once a Big House, a place of and for privileged elites, its demeanour less than welcoming to the masses. Today it belongs to the people and is at their service. It will hold, protect and tell the stories of privileged and poor alike, for, without all sides to our many stories, we remain in danger not just of misrepresenting our past or having it misrepresented to us but we remain in danger of knowing our neighbours only as incomprehensible strangers."
Among the Famine records from Strokestown House, Co Roscommon, shown to Mrs McAleese was a request for food from a woman who may have been her great-great-grandmother.
"She's not sure of the exact connection but she thinks it could be her great-great-grandmother or even her great-great-great grandmother," a spokeswoman for the President said.
An entry on an estate ledger dated June 22nd, 1846, read: "Mary Lenehan of Elphin Street (Strokestown), recommended by Mr O'Beirne, and who received half a stone of meal."
Mr O'Beirne was an agent of Major Denis Mahon, head of the estate at the time Mrs Lenehan sought food. He was assassinated on November 2nd, 1847, after evicting thousands of starving tenants from his estate.
The President was shown the document for the first time yesterday.
President McAleese's father, Paddy Leneghan, is from Croghan, Co Roscommon.
