libraries, public

libraries, public. Restrictions on access to the college and diocesan libraries that developed in the 17th century may have motivated Narcissus Marsh, Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin 1694–1703, to found a library there in 1701. Open to all ‘graduates and gentlemen’, its claim to be the first public library seems justified, though the limited range of its holdings may have ensured a small membership. The town library founded by Archbishop Robinson in Armagh in 1770 served a broader membership, as did the libraries organized by voluntary subscriber democracies in Belfast (1788—see linen hall library), Dublin (1791), and Cork (1819), as well as in smaller towns and villages. Elsewhere the demand for reading material was partly filled by commercial libraries and by parish and church libraries. In the 1830s and 1840s the libraries of temperance societies, repeal clubs, and mechanics' institutes revealed a growing reading public but there was also anxiety regarding its reading matter. In 1849 a parliamentary committee advocated rate‐funded free public libraries. This led to the Public Libraries and Museums Act (1850), whose provisions—periodically extended—applied to Ireland from 1853. The first library thus funded opened in Dundalk in 1858, followed by two others in Dublin in 1884, and another in Belfast in 1888. Local authorities were slow to allocate funds but grants by Andrew Carnegie and by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust between 1897 and the early 1950s facilitated substantial capital projects. By 1945 all the counties of both independent Ireland and Northern Ireland had established a library service, while those urban or borough councils without a service had passed their power to an adjacent county council. In 1973 responsibility for the Northern Ireland service passed to five regional education and library boards. Levels of funding and provision continue to vary, as does membership, though uneven record‐keeping has obscured the long‐term trend. By the 1970s between one‐tenth and one‐fifth of all adults were members of a public library, but in the Republic a pattern of growth was halted in the early 1980s by budget constraints which led to substantial charges, stock reductions, and restricted opening hours.

John Logan