Mr. Brian Donovan:

I would be happy to do so.

Senator van Turnhout asked specifically about the obstacles. There are a number of them, mostly around the access to the records and the ability to digitise those records. We have talked about some of the legal obstacles in regard to the 1926 census but it goes well beyond that. We have legal obstacles because of the Data Protection Acts to a vast quantity of record materials. Reducing the data protection regulations, let alone the Act, to 70 years, which one could do in most cases, would release tens of millions of records up to 1943 and would have a phenomenal impact on research.

There are some extraordinary legal obstacles which have been mentioned by a CIGO submission about the Land Commission. The records there are an enormous collection. We also have a real lack of knowledge within archives about what they can do with them. With the Eneclann submission, we cited the Registry of Deeds lack of understanding of what it could do with them. We cited the Valuation Office, among others.

However, the biggest problem that we have is that we can bring proposals to a public organisation and it can do nothing with them because it does not even have the staff to look at a proposal and assess whether it is worth doing.

One of things we called for in the submission is to make available business management expertise to the cultural sector to help them work through this. They need funding for a range of reasons but they need help with this one because it would unlock a huge amount and would end up in free records as well.