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

I raised this matter initially because it is a bugbear of mine. I thank the Secretary General for the comprehensive reply. I can see some of the issues involved, including the sheer scale of the information which exists. This is precisely the issue I was trying to draw attention to. If we compare our approach in the Republic to that taken in Northern Ireland, it is possible to walk into the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, PRONI, which is in a lovely new building constructed in the Titanic Quarter, and to look at the Land Commission records there. They are not digitised, but it is possible to go in and to look at them.

We have a 100-year rule on records but these documents seem to be an exception to this rule. The Department has said that these are working records and fragile. This is all the more reason, though, for why they would be digitised. This is a useful item of correspondence but I still think we should respond in turn and ask why we do not have a similar approach to these records, in the context of the 100-year rule not applying, and why there is a different approach in Northern Ireland to making the Land Commission's records there available. I ask this question because this information is a treasure trove. These are working documents for some people but they are also an important genealogical set of records.