Professor Loughlin Kealy:

Management of change is a perfectly good definition of conservation. I did not spend much time talking about the Washington Charter, which deals with historic areas and towns. One of the presuppositions of that document is that urban areas change, as they have done in the past and will continue to do. The management of change, therefore, comes into play as whatever means are necessary to ensure that the significance of a monument is not lost in the process of change. All of that belongs within planning and urban design, as well as in conservation. It is a wider question than simply the preservation of an actual structure.

The second question is similar to one I dodged earlier. I am also going to dodge Deputy Murphy's question. If I am to observe my brief here, I will not trespass on the area the committee will be discussing and making decisions about later. I apologise, but I am not going to go there.

This brings me to the third question.

One of the slides I used showed that the primary purpose of preservation or conservation is the preservation of evidence. If a particular society or group decides that a structure is significant for a number of reasons, the evidence of that significance is to be maintained. How this is done, compared with how the Acropolis is conserved or preserved, is a case of chalk and cheese. The general intention is the same but the modus operandiis vastly different and different kinds of skills are required. The conservation and preservation of the Acropolis has a number of different phases. Most of the past few years have been spent trying to undo some of the work done in the past. From a technical point of view, that work has proved to be incorrect and sometimes damaging.

I said that people are conscious of the differences of culture. In our culture alone, we have places where buildings are built of what I call fugitive materials - materials that decayed quite quickly. The preservation or conservation of a thatched cottage involves the continual replacement of the thatch. There is no way out of that. However, this does not mean that the significance of the building has changed. It just means that, in this case, the original material is not as core to its significance as it would be in the case of the Parthenon or the Acropolis. It is a different ball game.