Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I go back to the fact that if it is not written down in legislation, there is no tool to make it happen. There is a lot of really good work happening right now but a vision needs to be put down in legislation to ensure it actually happens.

There are a couple of things here. I do not accept the idea that this legislation would lead to damage of the archives. It is not necessarily going to divert resources from digitisation. Archives are never complete. They never reach a state of perfection and never change again. As the committee has heard, RTÉ is adding to it every day. I have digital files from my time in college sitting at home on a zip disk. I do not have a zip drive any more. I do not know how I am going to get those digital files up. Digitisation is not an end state. Digitisation is the technology you use to display, read and understand content. The software, programmes and physical infrastructure you use for digitisation is going to change in the future. An archive is never complete. It is always going to shift and change and is always going to need careful management.

I do not believe that in general, we value our archives half as much as we should. That is a broad statement and not a reflection of the good work RTÉ is doing. It values its archives and is struggling to get it done and is winning awards with its excellent work. In general, however, I do not think we value or invest in archives half as much as we should. That said, I do not agree that we should wait until the archive is in a state of perfection before putting this obligation on. The archive is never going to reach that state of perfection and having this obligation will help drive the importance of the archive, the change of funding and progressive realisation. Yes, it would be great to make the archive available tomorrow with all of those finding aids and metadata and all that complexity. However, it is not possible and it is going to change. By the time you reach that stage, the technology will have shifted and changed again. To say that we should wait for a moment of perfection and to not wait would be dangerous is wrong and is a failure to understand archives and how they work.

We need to set in our legislation a vision of what we want from public service to help ensure it happens. To have Coimisiún na Meán encouraging to make a commitment is a little stilted and does not carry the same force or weight as ensuring it will happen.