Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There would be a headache.

The difference between the face value and conversion value would cause problems if somebody came calling. With the Dormant Accounts Fund, somebody might come calling and it is cash in, cash out and it is the exact value, but getting into the business of selling X number of coins through whatever market could cause problems.

I want to ask Ms Mahony about that issue of finding correspondence. One of the issues is that we do not have any idea of the scale of what we are talking about in terms of resource. Mr. Leahy said we have no idea how many of these objects, boxes, caskets or whatever it is there are. We do not really have an idea of the scale of the ask on the national museums.

There may be personal correspondence involved here and there is the idea of social history. Correspondence that is 150 years old may have been banal and prosaic at the time but with the passage of time, it may have acquired historical significance. In terms of the digitisation of those records, do we run into any headaches around privacy issues? Obviously, if my box of letters was found in my childhood room, I would not necessarily like them to be digitised, uploaded and published. Is there any kind of indemnity involved in that or any conflict with privacy issues? Depending on resources, these records could ideally be digitised and put to one side, the letters put back in the box and handed back to the bank. That is surely not as simple as I imagine it to be, however.