Diarmaid L. Fawsitt’s archive now accessible to public

25th October 2022

Cork City and County Archives Service, Cork City Council is delighted to announce that it has carried out the processing and listing of the major personal archive of Diarmaid (Jeremiah) L. Fawsitt (b.1884 - d.1967), nationalist, republican, journalist, civil servant, judge. The archive was donated to the Archives in 2019.

A detailed descriptive list publication has been written and compiled over a 2-year period by archivists of the Cork City and County Archives, and this has now been printed and published thanks to funding from the Cork City Council 1920-1923 Commemorations and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

Born near Blarney Street in Cork’s northside in 1884, Fawsitt was active in cultural, industrial and nationalist circles, including the Celtic Literary Society, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League, Cork National Theatre Society, and especially the Cork Industrial Development Association. In November 1913 he attended the inaugural meeting of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin and was inducted into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In December 1913 he was one of the co-founders of the Cork Corps of the Irish Volunteers, at City Hall, later becoming Chairperson of the Executive. During the War of Independence, Arthur Griffith sent Fawsitt, as consul and trade commissioner of the Irish Republic, to the USA, to be based in New York. A friend of Michael Collins, he was also a technical advisor for the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921-22. Later, he was a senior civil servant in the Department of Industry and Commerce, and a Judge of the Circuit Court.

Fawsitt’s archive comprises a large collection of over 2,000 documents, such as correspondence, diaries, photographs, news clippings, articles, speeches, lectures, and ephemera related to his public service and involvement in many causes and organisations. The archive is of high quality and was kept with care by generations by the Fawsitt family.

The newly accessible archive, which was painstakingly listed, numbered and arranged by our archivists, is now available for public access and it will be a major research asset for historians of the Revolutionary Period and 20th century Ireland. The opening up of this archive to the public has been made possible through Cork City Council’s 1920-1923 commemoration programme and national Decade of Centenaries government funding. Several items from the Fawsitt collection, relating to Michael Collins, have already been made available online on https://publications.corkarchives.ie/view/604527883/