One of Ireland's leading photographers, Colman Doyle, has sold his archive to the National Library, which intends putting some of it on exhibit at the National Photographic Archive in Dublin's Temple Bar when cataloguing is complete.
The archive, consisting of over 25,000 images, is made up of news and feature pictures as well as portraits of many of the leading figures in Irish life since the early 1950s. It amounts to a photo-history of Ireland over the past half-century and beyond.
Speaking to The Irish Times yesterday, Mr Doyle said that some of the pictures would have been published in the Irish Press and Evening Press newspapers, as well as in Paris Match magazine, but most were from his own personal archive and had not been published before.
The feature pictures covered "everything from cock-fighting to ploughing", he said, and many dealt with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which he covered from 1968 until the early 1980s.Some of his own favourite pictures in the archive are photographs he took in 1951 of the last Blasket Islanders before they were moved to the Kerry mainland.
He has a particular affection for a low-angle shot of presidents Eamon de Valera and Charles de Gaulle, taken in 1969 when the French president was on holiday in Ireland.
Another is of poet Patrick Kavanagh "in a very good mood", taken in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan. "We were in a pub and we were talking about it a long time, and he didn't seem too keen. So I said to him: 'Come on. We'll just do it and come back for a drink.' That did it." They spent a long time in the pub afterwards, he recalled.
Born in Dalkey, Co Dublin, in 1932, Mr Doyle was near retirement age when the Press Group closed down in 1995.
