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

The other issue is that it is only recently that the expansion has been allowed in the National Archives in Bishop Street. I visited the National Library some years ago with members of one of the committees and I was horrified at the risk at which we are putting our national collection. Money has been allocated for that since.

This is bad news in this letter in that what has been agreed to is very limited. We should write back and try to find out why it was decided and what was the methodology for deciding. There was a big announcement not long ago about this. Why was it decided to only digitise the finding aids, as it were, rather than the records themselves? If they are that fragile, one would have thought that conservation and digitisation would be the optimum. I also do not understand why we do not see the benefit of these. Historians and genealogists have been looking for these for years.