Ms Catríona Crowe:

Deputy McLellan asked about the wonderful Down survey site, which is regarded as fabulous by anyone who has examined it. I am not actually sure whether what are called the books of survey and distribution on the site have been digitised yet, but if not, it will certainly be done. We have a set of those in our possession at the National Archives and are very happy to share them. They provide the names of landholders in Ireland before 1641 and also in the 1680s. They comprise the record of the massive transformations in land ownership that took place in the 17th century, the key century for changes in land ownership, particularly from the old Gaelic order to the new ascendency. There are names in those records that one will not find anywhere else. They are incredibly valuable genealogically and in terms of social and economic history. This is an example of how we are quite happy to share our material with any project that creates a website that is free to access. It gets the job done and the material is made available. A link is created between our website and that of the project. We must be as flexible as possible about this and ensure that anybody with a good idea is entertained. For example, we are now entering the year that will commemorate the outbreak of the First World War. There are plans for the State to hold various events, which I hope will be very innovative and interesting, to mark that anniversary. The big event will be the Imperial War Museum’s fabulous website called Lives of the First World War. We have been engaged with the war museums for the past two years. I am on the steering committee for that project. We have given the museum authorities the entire database for the entire 1911 census, so people will be able to use it as one of the elements relating to the 250,000 combatants from Ireland, 30,000 of whom died. We are very happy to engage in partnerships with anybody who will use the material in an innovative way as long as it is free to access, as this project will be.

The first phase of a fantastic project that relates to both the decade of centenaries and genealogy - namely, the project on the military service pension files - will be launched very shortly.

The military service pension files deal with people who applied for pensions due to their active service from 1916 to the end of the Civil War in 1923. There are 285,000 files altogether which is a gigantic collection. It is hugely informative and contains all kinds of names that will not be found elsewhere. We are hoping the first phase will be launched in January. That will deal with all the survivors and veterans of 1916. We are well ahead of the posse in terms of getting all that up online, free to access. It will be a totally online release. We will not be able to do that for the others because it is too resource heavy.

The other side of that is getting a new building for the Military Archives, which I believe is finally on the cards, so the many people who will want to see this material when it is released will have somewhere to view it. We helped out the Military Archives with the Bureau of Military History material, which is another fantastic genealogical resource that is now online due to the generosity of our own Department which paid for that to happen.

We took the duplicate statements from them back in 2003 when they were released because the stream of people coming to see them was so huge. People have a big interest in this material so we need to facilitate that. Over this decade the archival project must be way up there, front and centre, as part of what our aspirations will be.