Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The thinking behind the 80-year timeline is as follows. We presume the vast majority of people who put items on safe deposit are over 20 years of age, give or take, so that means it is 100 years since they were born. If they were alive today, they would be 100, and that is when you finish this rather long process, starting with the older ones first. The first reaction was to go to the date they were deposited, but since some of the boxes would be physical boxes with keys, you could be putting things in and out that could have been passed on between the generations and recent things could have been put in.

That provision was put in to provide protection in circumstances where you knew that this was an active box. It is under the remit of this Department because it was a kind of dormancy issue, but basically what we are interested in is things that are put in for 80 years. We could put a 120 years limit because it would take a long time to get that far down if doing this systematically. Regarding the timeframe, the whole idea was to do it in way that nothing was being opened where there was a high risk of interfering with people's current property rights and where we were actually likely to be reuniting people with things they did not even know existed, in other words, people who could prove they had an entitlement to the property by virtue of being the heir. In many cases, they would have to prove title generations back. That was the idea.

I was actually surprised that in all the debate up to now, nobody had suggested moving the timeline back a bit. When we fixed the 80-year limit, it was on the basis that somebody would be 100 years of age. It was a round number but it was not an absolute number. We could say a hundred years from now. The further back we put the limit, the less the risk of all the imagined scenarios such as people walking in and saying something was theirs. The saying is you learn as you go. If, for argument's sake, the limit was set at 100 years ago, if it got that far and it was found that all the risk people had worried about had not really materialised, then it might be decided to reduce it and jump forward another 20 years. If, on the other hand, issues arose that had not been foreseen, then the Bill, or the Act as it would be at that stage, would have to be amended and that would have to be dealt with. As I said, with any legislation that is brought in, if we are going to do anything, we have to minimise the risk but we also have to be ready to deal legislatively with any unforeseen consequences that have not been thought of. That has often happened during my career in politics. I do not know how many cases have come forward where there was some lacuna in the law that had to be dealt with, sometimes swiftly and other times not so swiftly. The Bill is constructed to try to minimise that but it cannot be a thousand per cent. We were trying to be very comprehensive on that purpose.

Certainly, from the debate we have had to date, it can be taken, particularly since the banks have no problem keeping all this space, that the idea of selling does not arise. The other issue that does not really arise is that if old currency more than 100 years old was found, I would imagine it would be of more interest and worth more in terms of its historic value than its cash value would be. Therefore, I doubt anybody would sell it anyway. The State would have a great interest in holding on to it because currency from 1850, 1860, and 1870 and whatever would be more interesting as notes than they would be as currency, even more so if coins were found.