The Mc Entee Report and its Implications for Irish Records Management

Following the Barron report, a Commission of Investigation under Patrick Mc Entee SC was set up in 2005 to look into the Garda Síochana investigations of the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan Bombings. Its report, published in April 2007, found no evidence of Garda collusion based on the documents available to it. However, an unquantifiable amount of records were missing (presumed either lost or destroyed), particularly from the Garda archives.

The report looked at the area of documentation with regard to the National Archives, the Garda Síochana, the Defence Forces, the Department of Justice and other government departments. The report findings can be summarised as follows:

· The National Archives: has insufficient staff and resources to discharge its statutory function. In practice, it does not receive the records envisaged by the 1986 National Archives Act from the Garda Síochana.
· The Garda Síochana: has not maintained the integrity of its files over the years since 1974. It is not possible to account for exactly what documents are missing owing to: 1) inadequate records management systems, 2) misfiling or human error and 3) unauthorised and/or accidental destruction and/or removal of documents. The Gardaí did not even know that they were missing documentation. There exists in the Gardaí the practice of not listing or recording individual documents within a given file, which is inappropriate in an organisation which handles security and intelligence material.
· The Defence Forces: have an adequate system in place to prevent documentation from disappearing. Every file they submitted to the Commission was intact and there is no evidence of any being missing.
· The Department of Justice: is missing three registered files opened in 1973 by its Security Division and it cannot be established whether or not these are relevant to the investigation. The content of the Department’s files were not indexed, so it cannot be established that they are intact. Documents containing confidential information received by them from the Gardaí were not registered and some may be missing.
· Other Government Departments: did not record the individual documents within a file, which means that documents could go missing, unnoticed.

The Commission praised the Defence Forces highly for their record-keeping, a view Eneclann can concur with having worked extensively in recent years with the Defense Forces on their Archives.

The overall message of the report (with regard to archives) is that better record-keeping systems are vital in several government departments, particularly for records of a sensitive nature. A thorough records management programme could have preserved and protected the missing documents. In this way, the various government departments would have been able to produce vital evidence and perhaps would have helped to clear up the mystery of what really happened in 1974. It is up to us to look after our current records, which will be the archives of the future.