Ms Fiona Ross:

I can speak directly regarding the Catholic parish register records we hold on microfilm with the National Library of Ireland. They are available free to access in person on Kildare Street and it is a long-held wish of ours, and part of Government policy, to make those available. I confirm that those records in microfilm format are available free to access in person on Kildare Street and obviously it is a great wish of ours to make them available more freely.

I welcome Deputy Catherine Murphy's comments on our staffing and storage issues. The staffing issue has a major impact on our ability not just to do genealogy, which is a small subset of what the National Library does on a daily basis, but all of the other activities we do. We see a great deal of scope for expanding all of our activities, with even modest additional staffing. She spoke specifically about cataloguing. If there are 70,000 boxes at the National Archives, I would hate to tell her how many there are at the National Library. At the last count we reckoned there were about 10 million items in the National Library. We have a lot of cataloguing to do. The idea of coming up with more creative ways of solving that staffing issue through job schemes, etc., arose during the discussion on Tuesday. We have looked to secure some support for that in the future, which is something we would love to examine. I will ask my colleague Ms Colette O'Flaherty to deal with the storage issues in some detail.

I will ask my colleague Ms O'Flaherty to discuss the storage issues in detail.