Mr. Frank Treacy:

To be digitised, a property must be registered. I must give a quick history lesson. We have a registry of deeds dated from 1707 dealing with priority of documents. The Land Registry is a register of title originated by an Irish man called Torrens in Australia, with the system spreading to Canada and England. All the common law countries have a similar system. In order to have an e-conveyancing system, we need to register all the remaining pieces of land and digitise them. There is an ongoing programme to register all those plots and therefore digitise them.

It is hard to put a date on it because we are introducing new legislation which could involve a quicker way of doing it. It would be very resource intensive if we had to investigate all the titles, but it is something we are examining.