Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 90:

In page 40, to delete lines 32 to 35 and substitute the following: “(5) Where the Minister is minded to take a Register action which, if taken, will cause a registered monument to cease to be a registered monument, he or she shall do so—

(a) in the interests of archaeology,

(b) in the interests of health and safety,

(c) having laid the proposal before each House of the Oireachtas for 21 days of consideration, with the options to the Houses of approving or annulling the proposed Ministerial Register action,

(d) having consulted with the National Monuments Advisory Council and the Heritage Council to seek their views (if any) on the action, and

(e) be guided by those views (if any) on taking the action or not.”.

This is about trying to put in more robust criteria for the Minister if the Minister is inclined to take a register action. There is very nice language in this Bill, but what we are talking about is removing monuments’ protection from the register so that those monuments can effectively be removed or destroyed. It is a significant measure. I will not go back over the history of this country, but even in recent decades and as Deputy Ó Snodaigh mentioned, we have seen the considerable destruction of heritage. One of the many reasons the Green Party emerged in Irish politics was out of a concern for the destruction of some of our heritage. In the 1980s, the Green Party was seen as one of the political forces, along with Sinn Féin and others, that were interested in protecting our heritage, including our built heritage. Housing activists were involved in previous decades as well.

Through this amendment, I am seeking to restore some of the language that was in the 1994 amendment of the National Monuments Act. The National Monuments (Amendment) Act 1994 was universally applauded and was meant to assure citizens that Wood Quay, which was the reason for that Act’s wording, would never happen again. After all of those campaigns that people were involved in, the Oireachtas rebalanced power under the 1994 Act to make the process for receiving consent to destroy a national monument more difficult to obtain and less subject to potential conflicts of interest.

Under the new configuration, to interfere with a national monument and to obtain a section 14 consent, it was required to get the consent of the commissioners, the local authority or the Minister, and consent would only be given if it was in the interests of archaeology to do so, or the Minister could give approval, but only in the interests of public health or safety. If ministerial consent was issued for another reason, the consent had to be laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas, which had 21 days to annul the order.

The 1994 amendment of the Irish cultural heritage legislation reached an advanced and carefully balanced form. The re-employment of the 1994 wording would restore that balance in the wake of the very negative 2004 amendment that was brought in. This is all in the context that we do not have a cultural or heritage ombudsman and, indeed, that the courts have made it clear they cannot intervene on behalf of our national heritage. The 2004 amendment to the National Monuments Act, in the words of the Supreme Court, removed a bundle of protections from the Act. This was made crystal clear in the decision by the Court of Appeal in regard to the 1916 Moore Street site, where it was ruled that despite the site having been declared a national monument, its full extent or historical landscape could only be defined by the relevant Minister. The court concluded that, as the law stands, it was purely a matter of political assessment.

The only concession made to outside consultation in the new Bill is that the Minister should refer the fate of a contentious monument to the Heritage Council and, therefore, the Bill as currently presented proposes to maintain the unfettered primacy of the Minister of the day with responsibility for heritage. One individual’s decision shall, accordingly, continue to determine the fate of an archaeological or historic monument regardless of its importance to the heritage of Ireland and there will not be sufficient checks or balances in place. The Bill in its current form maintains the negative concentration of power and the status quothat has applied for the past 20 years. It is very important that the 1994 wording, which came about as a result of what happened at Wood Quay and all of the destruction in the 1960s and 1970s, is put back into the legislation so we have those safeguards. It is widely recognised that the 2004 amendment was very regressive and now would be the time to correct that.

I asked the Minister of State last week to tell us how many archaeological licences were issued by the Department in the last 20 years since the 2004 amendment to the National Monuments Act, and of those, how many new archaeological remains of monuments were recovered and how many of those new archaeological remains or monuments were preservedin situ, which is important. Of those that were preserved in situover the past 20 years, how many, if any, have contributed, for example, to the portfolio of Ireland's Ancient East?

It is worth noting Articles 1 to 5 of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which was adopted at Paris on 17 November 1970. Article 5 of the convention concerns organising the supervision of archaeological excavations, ensuring the preservation in situof certain cultural property and protecting certain areas for future archaeological research. With regard to the earlier discussion about excavations being a destructive process, of course, the best way to limit that, when there is something significant being excavated, is to preserve it in situ.

What I am trying to do in this amendment is to get back to the 1994 wording and get the protections and balance of that back. Hopefully, the Minister of State will be able to tell us how many have been preservedin situsince the 2004 changes and how many of those are included in Ireland's Ancient East, for example, or other significant displays of our archaeological heritage.