Mr. Liam Bradley:

I will deal with loans and I will defer to my colleague, Ms McCarthy, who will deal with history. How can we improve the procedures for loaning items? We attended a seminar in the National Gallery of Ireland two years ago on lending objects to national institutions and national institutions lending objects to the greater community. A point that was raised time and again was personal relationships and building up such relationships. I cannot emphasise enough that one can be so busy doing work that one does not realise that another person 20, 30 or 100 miles down the road is doing the same work. We are such a small country, there is no real reason we cannot know exactly what everybody else is doing in a very general sense. Those personal relationships which can be seen today are one major step in how we can improve, and funding is another area where we can improve. I will now defer to Ms McCarthy who will answer the question on history