‘We collect without fear or favour’: embodying inclusion at the Linen Hall Library

‘We collect without fear or favour’: embodying inclusion at the Linen Hall Library
by Allan LEONARD
16 October 2026

A Good Relations Week workshop at the Linen Hall Library offered an unusual angle on this year’s theme of ‘Include’: rather than framing inclusion as a goal to be worked toward, it asked how a library collection can embody it. Patsy Horton of the Linen Hall Library and Sam Manning, its outreach and engagement officer, drew on the breadth of the institution’s holdings to trace over two centuries of Belfast’s life and political history, and to explore how archives can open conversations that might not otherwise happen.

A pocket and a lexicon

Patsy Horton opened by introducing two items on display that she described as personal favourites. The first was a beady pocket — a garment traditionally made and worn by women in the Traveller community. Each one is unique, decorated by its maker with beads, buttons, threads, and ribbons, and used to keep precious belongings close to hand: photographs, birth certificates, things of particular value. The example in the library’s collection, Horton explained, is “a combined handbag, purse, and sewing kit” — a single object that carries within it a community’s material culture and a specific woman’s life.

The second was the Robert McAdam Comparative Lexicon, a ten-volume work produced in the 1880s by Robert McAdam — a Belfast businessman, founder of the Soho Iron Foundry, and co-founder of the Ulster Archaeological Society, who was also a fluent Irish speaker and passionate collector of language and music. Over the course of his later life, McAdam attempted to translate 13,000 Irish words into a range of languages that included Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Icelandic, Sanskrit, Italian, Spanish, and French. He never finished it. “It’s a kind of mad work,” Horton said, “obsessive. But it is the breadth, the vision.” She described the lexicon as an emblem of what Belfast has sometimes been at its best: “inclusive, multilingual, multicultural, outward-looking”.

A collection born from a leaflet

Sam Manning introduced the Northern Ireland Political Collection (NIPC), now one of the most significant archives of its kind in these islands. It began in 1968 when a librarian named Jimmy Vitty picked up a civil rights leaflet from the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) on a Belfast street and brought it back to the library. That document became the seed of a collection that now holds more than 350,000 items — pamphlets, posters, textiles, badges — spanning every political party, community, and viewpoint in Northern Ireland.

The founding principle of representing all sides has been tested more than once. In the early 1970s, the RUC opened a police case over the library’s possession of a NICRA pamphlet titled “How to Discredit the Police”. When staff explained that they collected from all sides of the conflict, the case was dropped. “They said that we could collect without fear or favour,” Manning recalled. On New Year’s Eve 1993, the IRA planted incendiary devices in the library’s Irish section. A fire crew nearby contained the blaze but some books were damaged. The IRA subsequently stated that the library “was not a target” and that the damage “was regretted”.

Among the items Manning displayed were: a UDA recruitment pamphlet from the early 1970s; a Republican ABC (a politically themed alphabet book created by a husband-and-wife team); a collection of women’s history materials, including a rosette from Monica McWilliams (co-founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition); and cardboard doves used by Women Together on peace marches in the mid-1990s. More recently, the collection has expanded to include LGBTQ+ advocacy materials and Brexit ephemera.

Documenting change

Manning outlined two current projects. The first, recently completed, drew on the archive of All Children Together (formed in the early 1970s to promote integrated schooling) to produce an exhibition, oral history recordings, and a programme of school and community events. Among the project’s most significant acquisitions were the personal diaries of Sheila Greenfield, the first principal of Lagan College, donated by her daughter after Manning made contact. The diaries document the school’s opening day in 1981, including a police presence on site to protect the pupils. Greenfield passed away during the course of the project. “We were very privileged,” Manning said, “to be able to recognise the work that she had done at the school.”

The second project focuses on the history of music in Belfast from the 1960s to the present, funded by Belfast Stories, a visitor attraction due to open on Royal Avenue in 2030. An exhibition is planned for next year. Concert flyers such as Louis Armstrong at the King’s Hall, the Beatles at the ABC cinema sit alongside punk fanzines, a Rock Against Sectarianism poster from Queen’s in the late 1980s, and an advert for Delaney’s, a gay club night that ran in premises now occupied by the Linen Hall Bookshop on Rosemary Street. Members of the public are being invited to share memories. Already received are an account of seeing Billy Bragg at the Ulster Hall on the night Margaret Thatcher resigned, and a scarf worn on stage by Rory Gallagher, donated by a fan who was at the gig.

Getting the collections out

I asked Manning about the library’s outreach to schools and community groups, and whether physical collection materials are shared in those settings. My query stemmed  from my involvement in the library’s Troubled Images project, digitising 3,500 items from the political collection, concerned about the fragility of the physical items.

Manning described two distinct approaches. For secondary school groups, the norm is for pupils to come to the library, where the full range of material can be shown safely: “We aren’t able to take a lot of the material outside, so I think it gives them a better experience if they come in and we can show them everything.” For younger children, the library goes out to schools, with a more simplified presentation tailored to the age group. During the integrated education project, for instance, Manning visited Fort Hill and Forge Integrated Primary Schools, where pupils were invited to complete the sentence “Integrated education is…”. One card read: “including everyone together”.

Patsy Horton added that the choice of venue matters in itself. Getting pupils out of school and into the Linen Hall, she suggested, changes the nature of the conversation: “There’s that idea of having a safe space where people feel able to talk.” The library, as a place that belongs to no political tradition and holds material from all of them, can offer a kind of neutral ground that is harder to create within a school setting. The collections, in this sense, are not only a record of the past: they are a resource for the present — a way of bringing contested histories into the room without the weight of institutional allegiance on either side.