Archives
- The Salamanca Archive in the Russell Library, St Patrick’s College Maynooth is currently being catalogued. The collection, containing over 50,000 items, holds material pertaining to the Irish colleges in Spain dating from the late sixteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries. The catalogue will available on-line and some of the collection’s key documents will be hosted on the web.
- The Irish seminary community in Paris originally formed around a priest called John Ley in the 1570s. It did not obtain a permanent home until 1677 when the Irish student community was accorded the use of the Collège des Lombards in the rue des Carmes by letters patent of King Louis XIV. The Lombard college had originally been founded in the fourteenth century. The archive containing the deeds of the collège des Lombards formed the nucleus of the Irish college archive, which today houses nearly 20,000 items.
- Paris was always a popular destination for the Irish. From the end of the sixteenth century until the 1930s a community of Irish clerics lived in the university district on the Left Bank. Today the library of the collège des irlandais is accessible to researchers in the Centre Culturel Irlandais, housed in the old Irish College in the Latin Quarter.
