The collection includes:

• an early copybook containing “Poems of a Primitive”, unpublished poems dictated to his brothers, which pre-date My Left Foot;
• a group of nearly thirty poems in manuscript and typescript;
• two unpublished typescript short stories;
• the publication typescript of his last novel, A Promising Career, with covering letters by his publishers;
• typescript of an unpublished play, Mrs Brennan;
• some 100 pages of partial drafts and segments of mostly unidentified prose works, typescripts with revisions and deletions, including a draft of the second part of A Shadow On Summer (14 pages), and about 80 pages of mainly discarded or rewritten pages from prose works, some with notes by Christy Brown or his editor David Farrer, with deletions;
• typescript drafts of sections of several of his later novels;
• 27 typescript poems sent to Katriona Maguire (and dated by her);
• other poems sent to his brother Sean;
• cyclostyled text of the BBC adaption of My Left Foot, broadcast in 1954 (but not longer extant, with neither recording nor text held by the BBC today).

There are also more than 40 letters to Katriona Delahunt (later Maguire), the social worker who was the first person outside the Brown family to foster his talents as an artist and writer.

There is also a 1945 watercolour inscribed with the words:

“…I am writing this letter with a mixed feeling of regret and determination: regret as this is the last letter I shall write for the next five years; determined to write the next letter with my hands. Am I mad, you wonder? The answer is no. I flew to London with my mother yesterday…”

The NLI confirmed the acquisition was possible through financial support provided by an Irish company, Direct Medical.

Fahy said the National Library of Ireland would preserve and store the archive, and that elements of it would be incorporated into exhibitions at the Little Museum of Dublin.

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