Ms Catríona Crowe:

Philanthropy is great but it is not as available as everyone thinks it is. People come to Farmleigh regularly but we do not end up with them queuing up to give us vast pots money to spend on our cultural heritage. It would be lovely if we did but it is not happening. We were fortunate to get the bequest we did to deal with the registered papers of the Chief Secretary's Office. A professor of French in California, who had never come to Ireland but had Irish relatives, left a good sum of money for heritage projects which we bid for and got. However, that money is going to run out and we will have to mainstream this project because it is one of the most important collections we have. The National Archives can apply to the Wellcome Trust for funding to catalogue, preserve and index our medical records. Last year, for example, we took in the records of Grangegorman, a significant body of extraordinary material going back to the 1840s.

Senator van Turnhout referred to the problem where someone travels to the National Archives to look at some material only to discover it is in the Four Courts and they must wait a day for it to be retrieved from there. There is nothing we can do about that until we can gather all our collections together under the one roof. The economic common sense and customer service aspects of uniting our collections are obvious.