Ms Catríona Crowe:

I share Ms Ross’s desire for the Catholic registers to be made available free to access. However, there are many other issues about these registers, not least their safety. The National Library collection is on microfilm made many years ago from the original volumes. We do not know the conditions or state of these original volumes. It must be borne in mind the Roman Catholic Church is a private organisation. This issue will have to be resolved at a very high level in terms of the regular church-State talks that take place. We urgently need to have a survey of Catholic parish registers across the country and their condition. Do they need to be preserved differently? I know in some dioceses they are well preserved but by no means in all. Some of them could be in outhouses and sheds.

Ms Ross and I visited the Episcopal Conference in Maynooth where we found ourselves with five bishops and a cardinal. It was an interesting afternoon where we challenged them as to their responsibility for this major irreplaceable piece of our cultural heritage, pointing out it is a public good. They were very receptive with one exception. However, nothing has happened since. I know the wheels of God grind slow but a year and a half is a long time to wait for some kind of a response on this.

The Roman Catholic Church also has rights, as it sees it, when it comes to the microfilms in the National Library. It may be that it would not be amenable to the desire to have them digitised and put online, either for money or no money. In fact, the idea we might charge for them might be the red rag to the bull that might drive the whole project off the rails. There has been no agreement from the church, as yet, that this can happen.

There needs to be a commitment made by the church to the State as to what is to happen with the Catholic parish registers. They are far too important to be left in private hands, whether it is the Irish Family History Foundation or the dioceses, unless they can give a guarantee that they will be preserved. It must be remembered that the diocesan records the National Library has only go up to 1900. What about the later 20th century cohort of records? There are many complex problems with this matter which need to be resolved at a high level.

I mentioned the public good. I have no problem whatever with State agencies generating revenue. There is no guarantee that any revenue generated by the National Library or the National Archives can be kept by them. Instead, revenue might be swallowed up by the Central Fund and not be ring-fenced for projects in the National Archives. Some years ago, in partnership with the Royal Irish Academy, the National Archives published a study on the 1911 census which has made tidy profits for us but we have been told we cannot keep them. What is that all about?

I believe our national cultural heritage is a public good and should be treated in that way. I am delighted we do not charge for entry into our libraries and museums. We do not want to get to the point that everything is subject to the philosophy of making money, that everything has to be revenue-generating. If we had charged for the census online, we would not even have had a tenth of the users we have had and people would have thought it was mean-minded. The goodwill we got from our citizens and the diaspora for making it available free has been priceless.