New light is being shed on one of the most controversial areas of British history with the online publication of thousands of witness statements from the Irish rebellion of 1641.

The publication is the product of a three year collaboration between academics from the University of Cambridge, University of Aberdeen and Trinity College Dublin, which has involved over 50 people.

The archive brings together over 8,000 eyewitness accounts of the famous massacre of Protestant settlers by Catholic rebels in Ireland.

The depositions were made to Royal Commissions sent to investigate the rebellion and were given to Trinity College Dublin in 1741.

Since then the accounts, made up of over 19,000 pages, had been filed together indiscriminately leaving the research team the enormous task of sorting and transcribing the documents before publishing them online.

The project was funded with grants of over €1 million from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the first time they have combined to enable such a large project.

Professor John Morrill, of Selwyn College and one of the four Principal Investigators on the project, said this was a “hugely contentious” area.

The importance of eyewitness account cannot be underestimated he said.

 “Wildly inaccurate accounts of the massacre were published at the time,” he said, contrasted this with witnesses who were “obsessed with getting their stories properly reported”.

Publishing these documents online is an important aspect of the project, especially in Ireland where the rebellion is seen as one of the roots of the Troubles.

“Huge numbers of people in Ireland are looking to see what happened in their village or to their ancestors,” said Professor Morrill.

The significance of the project was recognised as both the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and Ian Paisley, the famous Unionist leader, attended the launch of the exhibition at Trinity College Dublin.

As well as being a political record, Professor Morrill emphasised that the records “tell a very human story of loss”. The statements are mainly from Protestant witnesses and “disproportionately from women and often from widows”.

The documents are sorted online by Nature of Deposition in categories such as ‘Arson’ and ‘Multiple Killing’. Their accuracy will be a source of controversy but they form an astounding historical record.

The archive will run as an exhibition at Trinity College Dublin until April 3, 2011 and the documents are available online at 1641.tcd.ie