Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have a number of questions. I represent an area which is, in many ways, spoiled for choice. Dublin South-Central includes Kilmainham, Inchicore and quite a number of buildings in terms of built heritage in particular, but there are also the canals and the Liffey and all of that. Much of my time in the area has been spent encouraging, though little encouragement is needed, and working with different aspects of local communities in trying to enhance or exploit heritage for the community and put it on show for people coming to look at it.

We have been quite successful in recent times. We managed to get the local authority to buy an old mill that NAMA was holding from us - Kilmainham Mill. The question now is what to do with it. A plan has been there over the years. It is great when we have a success like that because we have lost so much over the years. It allowed the committee to go into schools. I think two of the representatives had a far greater understanding of how the mill was used than most of us on the committee and now visit and present to local schools. The mill was in operation up until the 1980s. There is footage of it in operation. People, including my grandfather, remember it. Suddenly, matters have been stirred. Once we stir people, be it with regard to history, heritage or whichever way we want to describe it because it is so vast, it acts as a spark, particularly for many young people. It gets them to switch off gadgets and they look at their own areas in a different way.

We will be dealing with the museums in the near future. New technology can be an advantage, particularly in the context of storage. My father worked in a museum for many years. I remember the scary stories he told me about storage. To my knowledge, some of that is still happening. In this day and age, everything should be catalogued and made available online regardless of whether it is going to be in a box forever more. I do not mind. The idea is that somehow or other, it is accessible to the public. We cannot put everything on display but people should know that we have it and protect it and that it is available.

There are two areas in which I do not have expertise so I might be wrong about them. Bord na Móna has just announced the ending of peat-fired energy generation and the cutting of turf in vast areas. I do not know whether our guests have given some thought to this. What will we do with the heritage? Is this an opportunity for us to reintegrate some of the species - what was before? How do we interact with that? The Minister might tell us at some stage and invite submissions because it is so vast and gives us an opportunity to do a lot of stuff for which we did not have money or the vision in the past.

Deputy Danny Healy-Rae has left. I thought he might have raised the next issue, which is how we protect some of our heritage sites in particular from the likes of rhododendron and Japanese knotweed? In the past, I saw a newspaper report that the men's sheds had gone down to Killarney to get stuck. Well done to them. From the little knowledge I have of rhododendron, I think they need to be on site every weekend for the next ten years to undo some of the damage and resurrect parts of the national parks. In my area, Japanese knotweed has held up a social housing project for a year because of questions about how to treat it so it does not just affect our heritage sites. It also affects future sites.

I thank our guests for quite an enlightening presentation. I have taken my own scribbled notes because if the Minister comes before us again soon, there are a number of points we can raise directly with her. Alternatively, we might write to the Department to see whether it will give consideration to the assistant heritage officers. If we achieve nothing else over the next year, we will have done a lot to help the Heritage Council, the local authorities and ourselves. The local authority in my area has done tremendous work and I have worked with it on saving too many buildings at this stage. Some people say that this is all I am involved in. Prior to the restoration of Richmond Barracks, the local authority worked with the library service and put a call out to the community in the Kilmainham-Inchicore area to carry out an audit of material. I had not seen this previously. It was held in a hall and anybody with any bit of history was told to come along. The material was photographed and scanned. The library service now has a log of a lot of material that is not held in museums. It knows where it is and what it is about and has interacted with them since then. This was a big job and it took place on a Saturday. I saw more weapons on that day than I have seen all my life. It was interesting because it was a barracks. People brought old memorabilia from the days when British soldiers were there and when the national forces took over the barracks in 1922, bits and pieces from soldiers who had been abroad and people who worked in CIÉ and items of general historical interest. The barracks has the roll books of the school that was set up there in 1924. There are data protection considerations as some characters are still alive and there are little notes about them so we must be careful. They are on show in a roll book. The museum there is very small but it does something of which I am proud. We wanted to do a lot more but it is only a small building. I will leave it at that. Again, I thank our guests.