COMMUNITY LIBRARIES

The origins of Irish public libraries may be said to lie deep in the monastic schools of the middle ages, which housed manuscripts transcribed by the monks and which acted as the precursors of modern day inter‐library loan centres. These custodians of learning, who travelled within Ireland and to Continental Europe with their manuscripts, were important in developing within the Irish a scholarly tradition and a respect for education in its broadest sense. Other more recent motivating factors include The Young Ireland Movement and The Repeal Association, which during the 1840s founded Repeal Reading Rooms with the object of furthering knowledge about Irish history and literature. In a country where national school education, founded in 1831, was considered to display an anti‐national ie anti‐Irish bias, the public library movement suggested the possibility of an alternative method of education to those who accepted the urging of Thomas Davis to “educate that you may be free”.