Mr. Kenneth Moore:

I do not have the specific details of the site referred to by the Deputy, but he has touched on a matter I can speak about and which may explain some related issues. There was vandalism of the site recently, which is really unfortunate and should not happen. We have been cognisant of that in recent years and there was a little bit of an uptick in such activity during the pandemic because of the increased number of people visiting heritage sites. Anecdotally or generally speaking, damage to national monuments has declined in recent years, at least as far as we are aware.

Last year, in conjunction with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, we ran a campaign called Protect Our Past to try to tackle vandalism. I hope it can help in light of what happened at Lough Ree. The campaign ran during the summer in general and standard media, as well as online. We used a variety of digital platforms on which to put the message. The idea was to get people to appreciate such sites. We firmly believe that we must educate people about this because using threats does not get us anywhere. That was the aim of the campaign.

It is difficult to know the reach achieved as a result of a campaign in standard media and newspaper advertising. On the digital side, we know it had a reach of approximately 2.2 million people. We think and hope it had an impact. There were one or two high-profile incidents in the past two years involving damage done to monuments. Generally speaking, such activity is not wilful; it is mindless more than anything else. I hope that campaign will assist in some way in protecting sites such as those on Lough Ree. I will revert to the Deputy with information on the site and plans for it.

The site comes under one of our teams in the western area. There is a conservation architect and depots of our general operatives in the west of Ireland. My colleague, Ms Collier, mentioned that some of the sites we have are inaccessible and island properties pose different problems with respect to access and the time it takes to get to them and back, etc. They are challenging.