Calling all amateur historians and family tree researchers! You can now access the world’s largest online database of Irish national and local newspapers from the 1700s onwards.

The archives, available at Irish News Archives offers members a national newspaper database where they can research newspapers presented as they were originally printed in black and white full-page format, as well as the current newspaper archive.

The archive consists of more than million pages of newspaper content from titles north and south of the Irish border. Many of the newspaper held in the database are available from when they were first published through to the current day. Thanks to the holding of regional and national titles, researchers can also contrast the county versus the country view on any given topic.

Contemporary events

You can read up on contemporary takes of key events in Ireland’s history, such as the Great Famine, the Home Rule Movement, the division of Ireland and more.

Newspapers, especially local ones, are renowned for the so-called hatches, matches and dispatches—i.e. births, marriages and deaths, which is great if you want to find official announcements of these that relate to your family.

And if you have an ancestor who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, local papers will be the best place to read a report of the court case and sentencing.

Examples in the archives include:

• The Belfast Newsletter, the oldest English language daily newspaper in the world, which offers an incredible resource for all Irish studies research and genealogical research. Incredibly, the oldest copy on record is for the year 1738.
• The Wicklow News-Letter, with copies dating back to 1900.
• The Irish Examiner, which runs from 1841 to the present day.
• The Sligo Weekender, which was first published in 1983. The paper started as a freeshet, which was an innovation at the time, and it was set up by the former employees of the Snia factory at Hazelwood in Sligo. The Italian manufacturer had closed the facility earlier in 1983, with many jobs lost. The freesheet was delivered to shops and households around Co. Sligo, and in 2002 became a paid-for newspaper.

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