Dr. Norman Gamble:

Deputy Murphy spoke about the state of records. I have been involved in research not into genealogy, but into history and 40 to 50 years ago the state of the records retained by CIE was appalling. However, to give them their due, we brought this to their attention in the 1970s, through one of my predecessors, Joe Leckey, who was a professional archivist. CIE spent significant money on the records then - it had more money then than now - but there are certain items that I would love to have the money to work on as they need to be retained in their present form. The nature of, for example, the Great Southern and Western Railway archives is one that does not lend itself to digitisation.

The railways had an appalling way of keeping records.

They listed the station and when somebody moved from one job to another, he or she was crossed out with a big red line and put on another page, before being moved to something else. We end up chasing people through these books and there is a wear and tear factor in that. There needs to be a general awareness, fostered by the Department, of the value of archives - genealogical and otherwise - in the history of Ireland. These records were not seen as having any value until the 1970s. They were there because they could not be got rid of and they were in damp cellars. That is probably true of a whole range of industrial and social archives across the country.

Another thing that worries me is that these archives are increasingly going into digital form and there is no longer any paper. I have grave doubts about the stability of much digital recording of accounts and payments from the early days of computerisation. The records that we and others have around the country are in paper form. They may be fragile, but we can keep them so that they do not deteriorate. If somebody gives me a large disk of payments and staff records from the 1970s, I do not even know how to get into it. We find it increasingly difficult to find people who can do that. This is being disregarded across the industrial sphere.