Between Ourselves and 1950s Ireland: The use of radio archives as an historical source

The written archives of a broadcast media organization are often the only surviving evidence that programmes once existed. Ireland's Radio Éireann (later Raidió Teilifís Éireann), like many state and other broadcasters up until the 1970s, regularly wiped programmes after broadcast when they were deemed to have exhausted their value. An example of such a 'lost' programme is the women's 'magazine feature' Between Ourselves (BETOS), broadcast between 1953 and 1959. This article uses BETOS as a case study to indicate how written archives can reconstruct these vanished artefacts, as well as suggesting the scripts' research value for students of 1950s Ireland, in particular students of women's history.