Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

If we continue in this way, we will need a great deal of storage. The €8 million will not even be a drop in the ocean. Five hundred years ago, people wrote by hand. Then they started printing, and we thought we were great when we got electric typewriters. Now, 50 versions of a document can be created in a word processor. There are certain ways of avoiding all of that, but that is secret knowledge of Secretaries General. Are we keeping everything and how will it be managed physically? Switching the timeframe to 20 years will add a further ten years. In the past ten years, we have probably produced as much material - I do not know if the Minister has statistics on this - as was produced from the 1920s to the 1950s. I imagine that, since word processors became common and the Internet became even more common, the growth in archives has been exponential. Is there a plan in place to make this law work or will we be just congratulating ourselves on passing another law even though nothing will happen because the law is unrealistic?