Mr. Steven Smyrl:

The Deputy mentioned the GRO. It might be worth looking at the GRO in Northern Ireland. I mentioned it in my address. In recent times, the GRO in Northern Ireland, by comparison to the General Register Office here in Dublin, decided that it was going to scan its records and create digitised records of them. I do not know whether it looked at doing this in partnership or whether it decided against that. However, we had been promised at an early stage - the early 1990s - a computerised index and as matters moved along, as technology rolled out, we were promised by the GRO in Dublin that the records would be digitised, they would be made available, there would be computers to be used for the public. None of this has happened, so much so that the old room at the Irish Life Centre in Lower Abbey Street was fitted out with purpose-built desks to house computer terminals and we still had to use these tattered old indexes. The staff there went out of their way to ensure that the indexes were rebound in more recent times because 20 years ago they had been rebound and the binding was falling apart and splitting. When it split open we discovered that it was made out of recycled Kellogg's flake boxes, which were squashed together, and they were falling to bits. In more recent times, more hard-wearing covers have been put on them.

However, the issue is that the General Register Office of Northern Ireland decided it was going to digitise its records. I and another colleague, who is not here today, Mr. Rob Davison, also part of the CIGO, appeared before a committee in regard to the Civil Registration Bill for Northern Ireland three to four years ago. Let us say that some of their political parties are more diametrically opposed to each other, yet were able to make decisions and make matters work. They worked with the GRO to help it create the legislation that it needed and this allowed it to digitise its records, to link them to index centres and to make them available in a public search room for the public to search through. There is now more legislation in place so that it can put scanned images of the historic records online. That was to be launched this year but it may be next year. In a short time, the General Register Office of Northern Ireland, GRONI, was able to do this. We, in the CIGO, representing all kinds of users, from quite a small number of professional genealogists to a much larger number of amateurs - I do not like the work "amateur" but I am talking about people who do this for their own interest - find it most frustrating that, once again, we feel left behind by the issues. Surely something must be done. Even in the times we are in, there has to be funding for this. There is the additional matter of the amount of revenue that could be raised from this by allowing access from a distance to these records.