Robert Dudley Edwards: how his biographer made use of newspaper archives

The biography of historian and archivist Robert Dudley Edwards, Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin is published this month, drawing repeatedly on newspapers within the Irish News Archive. Telling the Truth is Dangerous is to be launched on 26 and 27 June, and interested parties are welcome to attend (see details below). The biographer is the journalist Neasa MacErlean, formerly of the Irish Press and the London Observer, and she is also the granddaughter of Dudley Edwards.

A total of 16 newspapers are quoted in the book through the Irish News Archive, and numerous others could have been added. ‘Most people in Dublin know of Dudley through his activities at UCD,’ she says. ‘But he was also extremely active across the whole country, and this only became obvious to me when I started searching the archive in detail.’ By the time he was 39, in 1948, he was such a household name that he was a crossword clue in the Sunday Independent. But people who knew him afterwards probably associated him more with his later activities at UCD and then lobbying the government to set up National Archives. This eventually happened when his former student Garret FitzGerald became Taoiseach and put the legislation through in 1988, just before Dudley Edwards died.

‘I am so grateful to the Irish News Archive,’ said MacErlean. ‘We would have lost some of the most fascinating parts of his story without the records kept here.’ There are 54 mentions of the Archive in the book, averaging out at one per five pages.

Publication:

Neasa MacErlean, Telling the Truth is Dangerous — How Robert Dudley Edwards changed Irish History forever (Tartaruga Books, part of Note Only Words, published 23 June 2025. £11.99pb, 274pp, ISBNs: Printed book — 978-1-83952-917-7; E-Book — 978-1-83952-918-4)

Publisher’s website: https://notonlywords.co.uk/tellingthetruth

Launches:

Dublin: Thursday, 26 June at Hodges Figgis bookshop at 6pm

Galway: Friday, 27 June at Charlie Byrne’s bookshop at 6pm