Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I hope I am not straying into other areas but I wanted to pick up on that very point. I am a member of that commemorative committee. We are getting the most fantastic submissions and we meet relatively regularly. It is an incredibly important ten years ahead. I would have thought that, in terms of lifting the population and engaging people both at local and national level, we should be seeing that reflected. There was no mention in the Estimate of an amount of money. As I know many things will be funded, I would like to hear the Minister's view in regard to what is likely to happen in the next year.

On the areas that are self-funding, sometimes it is the ones that are not included about which one would ask a question. For example, the role of the chief herald has to be filled from within the National Library of Ireland, yet from what I can see that is likely to be a self-financing post. It strikes me that the embargo should be relaxed for that because it produces a return.

I looked through the Estimates to see if there was an increase in the amount of money available to upgrade technology, for example. I compliment the Department on the work it has done on its website in terms of the linkages to different sets of records, but there is a good deal of out-of-date technology in the National Archives of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland. It must be quite costly just to maintain microfilm machines and so on but it strikes me there should be some initiative to upgrade the technology to digitise or computerise it, which would be better value for money. The fact that it is not included in the Estimates raises a question. When the 1911 census went live it had 4.5 million "hits" in the first 48 hours. There are real opportunities in this, and some of the areas can be self-funding. We can charge for services, for example. We pay for services already. We pay to get a certificate. The indexes for births, marriages and deaths recently transferred to the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht but the actual records should go live, as they are due to do in Northern Ireland. There is an income to be gained from that. There is a real interest in this, and there is not any resistance on the part of people in terms of paying for the record. They pay for that record already and I do not understand the reason that is not being considered from the point of view of the positive contribution it can make, whether it is this Department or another Department. I would favour it being under the remit of one Department as a one-stop shop, but I am interested to hear if any analysis has been done on any potential income that might be raised from that source.