Professor John McCafferty:

The short answer to that is yes. We will not get a full picture and there will still be holes in our collective head, as it were, to return to my original analogy. One of the developments raised by the Chair, namely the digital world, provides us with the ability to link up disparate projects. Next month, for instance, we will be publishing the religious censuses of Ireland as taken by the Church of Ireland, then the State church, in the late 18th century. We are currently finishing this. There are chunks and chunks of information about individual families in these records. One can start to put these together with the 1654 civil survey and with other material from the 19th century. One does all of this online and then gradually one begins to be able to establish where, for example, one's family came from. We start to get, perhaps not entire runs of records, but certainly partial records.