30 years collecting February 24, 2012
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Irish Election Literature Blog.Tags: Irish Politics
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Rather than the usual Friday morning post, one with just leaflets from the February 1982 General Election…… Why?
Well this month marks an anniversary of sorts for me, its 30 years since I started collecting election leaflets!
What began as a small pile of Dun Laoghaire Constituency leaflets from the February 1982 election has grown over time to seven plastic crates full of material in my attic and a few hundred leaflets in my office space downstairs and a few old posters too!
30 years later I’m also totally confident in my hobby. For years I felt embarrassed when asking people to keep stuff for me, I got strange looks and was asked umpteen times “What do you want to keep them for?”.
I was lucky too in that relatives and friends of my parents kept material for me and in school and college people kept stuff for me too. Over the years I also wrote letters to parties and candidates requesting material.
The advent of the internet and email really opened up a whole new world for me, not just being able to start the blog but also in the ability to communicate with candidates and parties requesting material.
More importantly it enabled people to get in contact with me and send me stuff, something which I am eternally grateful for. The thrill I get when I come home to find an envelope or package containing leaflets.
I’ve also been able to supply leaflets to people for various needs. Be it leaflets from deceased relatives, museums, exhibitions, leaflets for books , magazines, newspapers, a thesis on women politicians fashion, or even recently leaflets for a TV show. Last week some old leaflets I’d posted were quoted in the Dail.
It has also opened the door for radio and television appearances, interviews, features in newspapers and magazines.
Aside from the physical material I have also collected thousands of election/ political related images and pdf files which are all backed up regularly to an external disk.
Given I’m a one man band and this is only a hobby I still have thousands of leaflets unscanned and yet to be posted.
As ever if you’ve an old or new leaflet lying about , want to see a certain candidate, want some old leaflets to start a collection yourself , then get in touch. irishelectionliterature AT gmail.com is the email.
Anyway, instead of posting my favourites (of which there are way too many), Here’s some leaflets from that February 1982 election
You’ll have to click to enlarge some of them.
Congratulations on 30 years! It seems to me to be more than a hobby, andperhaps a vocation? Or is that putting it too strongly? Or is ‘interest’ a better word? The scanning bit is the worst really, time consuming and yet necessary?
An ‘Interest’ is a nice way of putting it.
Hey, there’s worse…
Collecting archives of political pamphlets… the pages… the pages…
Happy anniversary IEL!
It’s a fascinating and also useful resource you have put together there, long may your hobby / vocation / obsession last
Thanks LATC. I was 12 when I started collecting btw.
Thanks for a brilliant resource for teaching electoral history too! And may you have many more years of collecting.
Frickin hell IEL. Collecting election leaflets and supporting SRFC – get a life. Only joking. Keep it up. Where do you stash all the stuff and would/should some library take it off your hands and mind it?
@WBS I am told that the best collection of Irish political pamphlets is in the possession of the part owner of one of Dublin’s better boozers.
Michael you should email me or IELB with who that is. Sounds intriguing.
Sounded like a tease to me
Unless you own a pub IELB!!!
You have mail. There is no guarantee that I am right.
Thanks Michael.
Well done IELB! I remember well collecting election leaflets from 1989, 1990 (presidential) and 1992 from around the midlands and from relatives in Dublin. Unfortunately at some point a few years later I decided politics wasn’t “cool” and discarded the whole bloody lot. I still don’t think politics is cool, but I wish I’d held on to the leaflets.
Just on Joe’s question – during a stint working in the National Library I was told that they ask people to bring in any election literature for their ephemera collection, especially if they can get stuff from beyond the Pale, so I was back to collecting midlands leaflets once again last February. They have some great scare-mongering election posters from the ’20s and ’30s in the NLI.
Yes some of the stuff from the 20s and 30s is incredible makes the smears Sinn Fein got in the past look like childs play.
Don’t know what I’ll do with them, although my children seem (amazingly) to have a slight interest in it.
If I won the Lotto I’d open a small museum of Irish Politics
A truly unique resource in so many ways