Dr. Ruth Johnson:

I will look at preservation in situand via record and those decision-making capacities from a different angle, coming from the Planning and Development Act side. Where local authority archaeologists are in place and have robust conditions attached to grants of permission, there is oversight through compliance. There is a lot of pressure on us to make decisions in relation to finds on sites that might constitute a relevant thing or a thing of interest. There is an assumption, where an archaeologist is employed by a developer to do rescue excavation for a development site in an urban regeneration area, that feature of a potentially relevant thing does not get evaluated. In some cases, we have clauses in our conditions that we have to exercise, and that is pressurised and difficult. Obviously, there is a huge risk for the developer and we have to be cognisant of that as well as the fact that they have a valid permission to develop the site and that we are managing loss. Where there is a national monument, one might find something one considers to be related to that archaeological monument but it is subsurface and it is on a site 50 m away. That decision-making process falls on the local authority archaeologists.

I refer to a previous point Senator Moynihan raised in terms of resourcing and the decision making that happen in local authorities at that level. With regard to the architectural offices, a provision was made in the Planning and Development Bill 1999 on architectural heritage for the appointment of conservation officers. That might be something the committee might like to consider in relation to archaeological heritage too.