There aren’t many country houses that have played host to the Queen, a clutch of US presidents, the Dalai Lama, Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley and the entire cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But Hillsborough Castle is no ordinary historic mansion. This Georgian building, tucked away behind a town square in the small village of Hillsborough, near Lisburn, is a royal residence, a government office (home to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) and from this month (July) a major new historic attraction which will entertain a hoped-for 200,000 visitors a year.

A working mens’ club is an unlikely setting for a museum devoted to the thirty year conflict that scarred Northern Ireland and claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people. But every day Kevin Carson, club member and part-time curator of the Roddy McCorley Museum will take visitors behind the clubs substantial lounge and around the three upstairs rooms that constitute a shrine to the Republican story of The Troubles.

The year that the golfing world descended upon the small seaside resort of Portrush for the Open Golf championship, I thought of my Dad who treasured his trips to this, and the other windy little golf courses dotted along the north eastern coast of Northern Ireland.

But truth be told, we children always found an excuse to scurry off when he embarked on one of his reminiscences about golf, a game we heartily despised.

I’m pretty sure we were the only house in our street in possession of a barometer. It wasn’t like having a colour TV of course, like the Pattons at Number 18, who had the neighbours coming round to have a squint at their superior goggle box. In our case, there was no queue forming to pop in to check on the air pressure before venturing out to work.

Historians, archivists and computer scientists will bring Ireland's Public Record Office back to life by creating a digital reconstruction of the destroyed building and refilling its shelves with fully-searchable surviving documents and copies of the lost records.

This extraordinarily ambitious project, called Beyond 2022: Ireland’s Virtual Record Treasury hopes to open its portals by June 30th, 2022, the centenary of the fire.