Mr. Seán Kirwan:

I thank the Minister of State. That is an important question with regard to the implementation of the Act. Obviously, we are not starting from square one because we have the existing mechanisms, as has been mentioned. One mechanism was established under the 1994 legislation, which is a record of monuments and places. This has circa 130,000 entries. There is also the register of historic monuments, which has 5,000 entries. There are also several hundred preservation orders in force. In implementing the legislation we will be drawing on our own resources and all of the data we have from those registers and records. We also maintain the historic environment viewer, which is an online and completely accessible database of all the known archaeological sites and monuments in the State, which we maintain in the National Monuments Service. We will be bringing all of that data together to compile the new register of monuments and, as Mr. Carpenter mentioned, new inventories, which do not confer statutory protection but do give people knowledge of what is there. Out of that, a subset of those inventories would be the new registry of monuments. All of that data is there, but there are new discoveries coming in all of the time. We constantly have to update. There is a huge amount of data already there that we will draw together.