Franc Sadleir

Barrett's death occurred conveniently close to the statutory date for choosing College officers, and so the vacancy for the Librarianship was filled within a week by the election of Franc Sadleir at the Board meeting on 20 November 1821. Sadleir's career was marked more by its administrative competence and his accumulation of College offices than by its academic significance. By the mid 1820s he was simultaneously a Senior Fellow, the Librarian, the Bursar and the Professor of Mathematics, and in 1837 he succeeded Bartholomew Lloyd to the far more lucrative post of Provost. If the diaries that he maintained from the turn of the century until his death in 1851 accurately reflect his main preoccupations, then those were primarily his finances, dining, preaching, his estates, and family matters. The Library featured rarely, and usually only when he recorded the arrival of a distinguished visitor to the Long Room.

In the early years of his Librarianship at least, he did not, however, revert to the practice of treating the running of the Library as a sinecure, as had some of his predecessors. The manuscripts again became the subject of attention. Scholars working on them at the time included Henry Monck Mason, who was allowed to read them in the Librarian's Room, and Sir William Betham, Ulster King of Arms, who borrowed several during the course of 1824. The inspection of the manuscripts for the Irish Record Commission in 1812 was followed in 1825 by another investigation, this time by a committee of the Royal Irish Academy, and for this the manuscripts were transferred in batches to the Fagel Room.