Mr. Chris Flynn:

Let me address a few of the issues that have arisen in my area specifically. I am the desk officer for both the National Archives and the National Library of Ireland. I take the criticism on staff numbers in both organisations and I must put up my hand and say it is a factor of the funding that is available to the Department overall. There is a moratorium in place and we just have to soldier on with the numbers of staff permitted. Despite the reduced number of staff, the staff in both the National Archives and the National Library of Ireland are doing tremendous work and they are still providing a good service to the public.

A question was asked about the 1926 census. The Minister has set up a working group comprising officials from the Department, the Central Statistics Office and the National Archives to examine the issues surrounding the census and the question of how the project can be advanced. A number of issues arise, the first of which is the legal issue to which members have referred. The Statistics Act has a 100-year rule and the CSO is not about to recommend a change in that regard. Another issue concerns where the project might physically be carried out. The 1926 census returns are not in the same condition as the returns for 1901 and 1911, on which Ms Crowe and I worked. They are just the paper returns. The 1901 and the 1911 results were put on microfilm and were much easier to digitise for that reason. We have a spatial requirement. The project must happen at the premises in Bishop Street because it is secure. We would need staff to carry out the project, but not any old staff. They would have to be relatively technically adept. The working group is currently examining all these issues and will be making a recommendation to the Minister in the coming weeks. Until this process is concluded, I will not be in a position to shed much more light on the issue.

On the question of maximising the return from genealogical records, there is tremendous potential. When we finished working on the 1901 and 1911 censuses and the material was put online, we certainly did not regard that as the end of the project, because the end involved finding a way to maximise interest abroad in the website and to use that website to get people to land here. We have had discussions with Tourism Ireland and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport over recent years. There are ideas on how the project could be carried out on the website. We have a number of website links already and they will generate traffic in other directions. We hope that can be developed to a more productive level.

Digitisation is the other big problem we have in both institutions, apart from staffing. We have no issue with commercial partnership if it works. In Denmark, the authorities went to the market and got Google or another multinational company to agree to digitise many of the holdings in the Royal Danish Library. The condition was that the contractor digitising the material got rights for either five or seven years. Even with that condition attached, anyone seeking to see the material with a Danish IP address got the material free of charge. The archive officials were able to maximise income from the Danish diaspora in the United States and elsewhere. That is possibly one model that could be examined. It would still give the Irish citizen the material online free of charge. We are very keen to be involved in partnerships with the admittedly reduced resources at our disposal.

Deputy Murphy mentioned storage. In the past, many potential schemes were proposed for the National Archives building in Bishop Street. We are now considering one we believe we can sell at ministerial and other levels. We have recently had a cost-benefit analysis completed on it, and we hope that a new logical scheme to maximise the use of the space in the very large building in Bishop Street might proceed. We will know in a few months. There is so much wonderful material in the archives that an exhibition space must be a sine qua non and a priority.