Mr. Conor Newman:

Yes, I will. Committee members are always welcome to visit the Heritage Council offices in Kilkenny. We would be delighted to have any or all committee members visit. Should the committee decide to dedicate a day to that visit, it would be music to our ears.

Deputy McLellan raised concerns about the funding of the Heritage Council. We are also concerned because our funding has been drastically cut. We lost a great deal of ground in 2009. Our budget was cut by upwards of 70% in 2009 and we have not recovered. Part of the reason we have not recovered is the background economic crisis in the country. As I have mentioned in my presentation, the problem is that we are beginning to lose ground. If one looks at the natural resources in Ireland we have a mosaic that we have not looked after with the degree of urgency we need to. The Heritage Council has a very small staff and a modest budget, with which it does amazing work. I say that as a private individual not biased by my role as chairperson. We need more funding in order to be able to continue the work we are doing. There is an enormous appetite among the public and we are not able to service it. If there is anything this committee can do to help lobby for more funding - the reinstatement of our grants programme for 2014 would be a major step forward in that regard - it would be very welcome.

The Hunt report on Further Education and Training was raised. I mentioned already that we need to introduce heritage as a concept in and of itself. The integrated thinking that is represented by the word "heritage" itself is something that we need to bring into our education system. As a person who works in the third level education sector, one of the things I see among first year student coming to college is that they tend to think in silos, they think in terms of biology as distinct from history as distinct from English. They do not cross-pollinate that knowledge in the way that is needed at third level, and not just at third level but as a society we need to be able to cross-pollinate from things we know in one arena into another so that we do not make the mistakes that we have made in the past.

I live near Athenry which has a famous medieval festival. They are important and there is a company that specialised in equipping people with all the gear, right down to the weaponry they might need. They will also rent out a horse for the day. They are very important and they are part and parcel of what the Irish Walled Towns Network is trying to promote. They are good for people and are good for tourism.

Deputy Coonan was interested in the preservation of bogs and the importance to our heritage of our peatlands. The Heritage Council has made a presentation in this regard to the National Peatlands Strategy in April 2011. We speak from the perspective of heritage and we rely on others to speak from other perspectives per se. To come back to the adage, "You can take a man out of the bog, but you can't take the bog out of the man", we have some extraordinary peatlands. Our ancestors have had to deal with peatlands in lots of different ways, both from a cultural point of view, from a religious and mythological points of view. There is enormous archaeological potential in our peatlands that we are not looking after to the extent that we might. There is of course the living heritage of the bogs. It is terribly important that we do not lose sight of that. While there is a biodiversity imperative, and the management of the water base and so on is of great importance, but so also is the living heritage of our peatlands as well. A balanced approach which recognises the heritage value but also the biodiversity and scientific value of our peatlands is the way forward.

My answer will be similar to the answer I gave in respect of the national landscape strategy, it will take time. This is something that will have to be thought about, people need to educated much more about what the peatlands are. When people talk about biodiversity and ecological services, one may ask what does that mean? Every third mouthful of food we eat has been pollinated by an insect. When members are driving back to their homes, count how many insects are plastered onto the windscreen of the car and I wager one will find that it is a fraction of what it was ten years ago. We are losing our insects because we are losing our habitats. Insects pollinate the fruits we grow. This may sound like a green agenda, but my point is that biodiversity is actually critical to our species. We cannot differentiate ourselves from the natural ecology. We rely on it. Our bogs are very important in that regard, to the extent, that a group of people in Holland use their own personal finance to buy Irish bogs and donate them to the Irish people. I am not sure if members are aware of that. All the bogs in Holland have been lost and these people know the consequences and they know we have bogs in Ireland. They research them, they buy them and then present them but with conditions that they are to be enjoyed but are not to be tampered with.

I was asked if heritage overlaps with too many different things and whether better value for money could be gained if excessive regulations were relaxed. That is a complex debate and I am not sure we have the time to go into this issue. Let me return to the principle of shared stewardship, which is very important. It is very important to have regulation. The authenticity of the heritage resource, and the preservation of that authenticity is very important, it cannot be a facade but must be truly authentic. That is why professionals are brought to bear on this. Not all of it is rocket science and consequently I would like to see a situation evolve over the next decade or so where there is greater public participation in the conservation of our heritage. If that were the case, then we would find ourselves in step with the most recent of the European conventions on cultural heritage, the so-called Faro Convention, which is a short document. Its appeal to professionals lies in its acknowledgement of the fact that their work in cultural heritage is public property and consequently if one is privileged to be qualified to work in it one must do so in a way that the public good, which involves participation, is manifestly clear.

I was asked about how I would like to be remembered. I would like to be remembered as the person who might have been able to claw back some of the financial losses that the Heritage Council has suffered during the course of the past five years so that we can begin to reclaim some of that ground and service the communities around the countryside. One of the things I have found most extraordinary in the past five years of travelling around the countryside, wearing my hat as Chairman of the Heritage Council is the number of people in every second townland who has benefited from the work of the Heritage Council.

It has provided an extraordinary legacy and it is painful to see that we are being compromised in our ability to pursue that, particularly because we have created momentum and appetite among the public for the work we do, but are not able to fulfil that to the extent we want.