Ms Catríona Crowe:

I will address Deputy Murphy's questions first. I thank her for her interest in our staffing problems, which are considerable. I echo what Ms Fiona Ross has said. When we look at comparable institutions in countries of similar population size, such as Scotland or Denmark, we have a third and a quarter of their staffing levels, respectively. We have always been badly under-resourced. Things have improved slightly in recent years, which is surprising given the recession. However, we are still way behind other comparable institutions in terms of what we need to catalogue our material. For example, the chief secretary's office registered papers, which is the biggest single archive on 19th century Ireland anywhere in the world, is not catalogued. We have begun the process of cataloguing it due to a bequest that we managed to secure from a philanthropic American gentleman, but the process is slow because it must be done properly. If things are to be done correctly, it takes time. We had two archivists working on that. We lost one of them two years ago, we are losing the other at the end of this year and we have had to wait until now to get an interview process to fill those positions. That is not satisfactory.

We could certainly do with multiples of tens of staff to get working on all this, but where would we put them? Our other big issue is space. We are full. We have three full repositories in Bishop Street, the Four Courts - the headquarters of the former Public Record Office - and at a quite expensive off-site storage facility to take the spillover from both of those buildings, and it does not make economic sense to spread things over three different places. We have some grounds for hope that a decision will be taken to construct a new building on the Bishop Street site, where the warehouse is currently located, and that should solve our problems and allow us to bring everything together in one spot. However, resources will have to be provided for that. We will need staff to manage it. Moving stuff around is murderously difficult and very labour-intensive. We do not give up hope. We know that we are struggling with very limited resources, but we still take great pride in the service we provide and we do our best.

The Deputy asked about other responsibilities that we might have. Our major responsibility is to make accessible the records of the Irish State. That is what we are statutorily bound to do. I focused on genealogy today, because that is the subject of the committee's hearings, but I could talk for hours and hours about all the other things we do in the National Archives which are equally important and sometimes more important than our genealogical services.

We never had any exhibition space in the Bishop Street building. We have created a number of travelling exhibitions, which are panels with digitised images of documents and other things on them. We look with envy at the National Library's beautiful exhibition spaces, which they are so lucky to have. They have done a wonderful job in converting the old Heraldic Museum into a spanking new exhibition space, with two terrific exhibitions this year. We do online exhibitions. The Deputy referred to our contextual material that accompanies the census, of which we are extremely proud, but the money ran out for that. It costs about €5,000 to provide a good dose of information about each county. When money starts to flow again, we are hoping we can finish that off so that every county in Ireland will have a section with photographs and historical information on what is going on. We did an exhibition this year on Ireland's entry into the European Union, which is currently travelling around the library system in Dublin, and we received a lot of praise for that.

I will move on to Senator Mac Conghail's questions. Our knowledge of the position regarding the 1926 census is that the Central Statistics Office is opposed to its early release. We did a number of exercises because we thought that this was about data protection issues, as there could be people in the 1926 census who are still alive. We worked out a way to redact those names, so that would not have been an issue. I think it is more about the guarantee of confidentiality that was given in 1926. There are worries about that. There are respectable arguments on both sides of this debate, but I would ask the Department to elaborate a little more on it, since we are not the key player in the decision to release the material. We would love to see it happen. We think 90 years is more than sufficient for these records to remain closed, and it would be marvellous to be able to compare our last pre-Independence census with our first post-Independence census and examine the many changes which happened in that decade, to which Colette has just referred. We do not see this as a possibility at the moment. It is not on our radar.

In terms of private sector versus public sector, things have changed quite significantly, as many of the private sector operators - certainly the two with whom we work, Eneclann and ancestry.com - have become very open to flexible partnerships, as committee members will have heard from Mr. Brian Donovan, with whom we work all the time on many things. The basis of our strategy is that we are in partnership with them and the LDS to try to do time-limited exploitation. That goes along with a bunch of what we call the crown jewels, which are the really special things, such as the Tithe Applotment books, that all go up for free. To give Eneclann its due, it has now expanded the number of record series that it will allow us to put up for free without any intervening period of commercial exploitation. We have done some very interesting work with ancestry.com and we hope to continue that. We are open to partnership with anybody as long as it does not cost us any money. That is basically the issue. If we can enter into fruitful partnerships with any organisation, whether commercial or voluntary, we are very happy to do that. I see that as being the future for practically everyone.

The Senator asked a very important question about the sequence of important records that should be made available. The Catholic parish records are gigantically important due to the tragic loss of records in 1922, including in particular the 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 censuses, which was a dreadful loss. The Catholic parish registers are then centre stage as our major demographic record with names of people for the 19th century. They are the only thing that comes close to replacing the loss in 1922. I have made no secret of my desire to see these records available free of charge online, properly indexed and linked to an image. That is the gold standard for genealogical websites. We should be able to see an image to verify the transcription or the index that has led us to it. Without that, I do not think we can be happy.

The second thing is the GRO, and the Department has already informed the Senator what the situation is. I stated in my submission that it would be marvellous if the certificates up to 1914 could be made available. It would be fascinating if officials from the GRO could let us know exactly what is its revenue stream is for its genealogical records, as opposed to the current business of supplying birth certificates to people for passports and so on. It has a thriving revenue stream. It would be good to know what exactly it is earning from the genealogy side, and if there was a way of replacing that in some way so that the records could be made available for free. If we had those two sets of records, along with what we have and will have, we would be in a very healthy position in respect of the rights of citizens and the diaspora to free access to our cultural heritage.

The other ones are the land records, which are hugely important. The Irish Land Commission records should not be closed to the public. They should be available and easy to access. The Land Registry instruments, which are extraordinarily interesting records which I describe in my submission, should be in the National Archives, but we have nowhere to put them - there is no space. They alone would be a fabulous resource, from the 1890s on, for the instruments that underlie land transfer. They tell one on what conditions land was transferred, often from parent to child. One gets all kinds of names in them. It is absolutely fabulous stuff but, again, we are up against resourcing issues there.

We are a fair bit along the way. There are differences of opinion about free access versus charging for records. We should try to keep records free to access as far as possible. We ourselves destroyed a vast quantity of our wonderful genealogical records. We cannot blame the British or anybody else for it. We did it to ourselves - congratulations. We also forced a large number of our population to emigrate over the years from the late 18th century on, and in the course of the 20th century people had to leave this country, and it is only fair that they should now be able to have access to really important information about their ancestors and the environment in which they lived. It is a gift we should give them as some recompense for the fact that people were driven out of this country by economic necessity. I have made no secret of my opinions on this. I really think we should be looking at providing free access to these records.