Ms Deirdre Mahony:

I will go to the Leas-Chathaoirleach's earlier point about where the policy responsibility might lie. Certainly, we would have a huge interest in the Department in any artefacts that might emerge which would be of benefit to the national collections and local communities through the network of local and regional museums.

To reflect on our intervention in the opening statement, we would be conscious of an administrative burden on the director of the National Museum of Ireland or her delegates of looking in every box. That would potentially be a huge amount of time requiring a variety of expertise depending on the kinds of artefacts involved. We would be very keen to see an intermediate step whereby there is some sort of pre-assessment. I am not sure with that intermediate step that it follows that the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media would necessarily take it all on board but, again, that is a wider policy discussion and one on which we would be very happy to engage with Deputy Ó Cuív and, as I mentioned, the director of the National Museum of Ireland and director of the National Archives of Ireland.

On digitisation, the Leas-Chathaoirleach asked a very interesting question and I do not have a quick answer. Obviously, we are engaged in a programme of digitising the national collections and within those, particularly in the archives of the National Library of Ireland, would be personal correspondence that is being digitised without any general data protection regulation, GDPR, issues of which I am aware. It might be worth reflecting on that fact and looking at how we do that. As the Leas-Chathaoirleach said, there could be efficiencies in digitising and putting that away. That is something for me to take back to the Department and maybe consider further.