Mr. Eoin McVey:

The staff number is very low by comparison with that in comparable libraries, particularly Scotland, which has the same kind of operation and population. The National Library of Scotland has more than 300 staff, as the Deputy said. We have had some increases. We are up to 103 or 104 from a low of 85 or 86. We are very appreciative of the 9% increase that we got at the budget, announced yesterday.

To answer the Deputy's question, we are short of staff. We are short of staff in critical areas, such as IT. IT is much more important than it used to be. It is a very vulnerable side of any operation. We are very low on resources for digitisation. If we do not digitise our content, we are not getting it out to the rest of the country. Doing so is terribly important. We are the national library for Ireland, not the national library for Dublin.

We have more employees than we had very recently but there are areas where we really have to do more, including the reading room, IT and digitisation, and areas where we would like to do more. Unfortunately, we do not have the number of employees necessary to move forward satisfactorily on those. Everyone has this pressure. We just have to try to keep asking and hope we get something.