Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I was probably the member who requested this. Those records are held in Portlaoise, Chairman, so you are probably familiar with the location in which they are held. There are 8 million records. They are a treasure trove. They are one part of the Land Commission records. The other part are the ones that relate to Northern Ireland and they are available to view in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast. They are not digitised but they are available. The matters they relate to are tenants of the land, issues around the revolutionary era, rentals, etc. They give a great deal of information and date back as far as the late 1800s.

What we are being told here is that the catalogue is being digitised rather than the records. The Department is telling us that these are very delicate records. It is dealing with the National Archives, which does brilliant work in conserving documents. However, there are two matters of concern. One is the longevity of these records in the first instance and the second is accessibility to those records, which have an important historical and genealogical benefit that we are not exploiting. We have a desperate attitude to our historical records. A load of them were burned - not by us but on our behalf - in the Public Records Office in 1922.