The major work of the Women’s History Project is to survey and list sources relevant to the history of women in Ireland. Two major databases have been created from work undertaken between October 1997 and August 2001, and both are available here for online searching.

The Directory of Sources for the History of Women in Ireland contains information on collections relating to the history of women in Ireland from the earliest times to the present, gathered from public and private repositories in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. The Directory covers over 14,000 collections and sources and contains over 100,000 pieces of information from 262 repositories.

Women in 20th-Century Ireland: Sources from the Department of the Taoiseach, 1922-1966, is the result of a survey that involved examining the files of the Department of the Taoiseach between the years 1922 and 1966. Just under 2,000 boxes of files were examined. Every page within each file was perused to ascertain whether it contained any reference to women. This database contains just under 20,000 entries.

Much remains to be done before we achieve an accurate picture of the place of women in Irish history. Our hope is that these databases will assist researchers to contribute to an understanding of that history.