Ms Eibhlin Roche:

On the question about access to our records, in recent years, the Guinness Archive has dedicated resources to creating an index and database based on all of our records. The first step to making this public was publication on our own website. We linked with the Irish office of Ancestry.co.uk two months ago following an approach it made to us. This decision is very much part of an overall strategy of making the information we hold publicly available. The information we have published on the ancestry website is not any more detailed than the information available on our website. Our view is that it will result in increased traffic to our website. Since we published on Ancestry.co.uk, traffic to our website has increased threefold. We provide free access to our information, which is top line given the nature of the records. We are very open to publishing the information on other websites.