Ms Fiona Fitzsimmons:

I will do so, and I would also like to respond to Senator Ó Murchú and Deputy Murphy. I was very interested to hear both of them talk about diversity. First and foremost, digitisation of records can secure the assets of our cultural heritage. Dr. Gamble referred to wear and tear. Where there is wear and tear, digitisation is particularly relevant. It is part of the modern conservation of records. It means that we can digitise records and then create a searchable index. People can actually find their ancestor in the index, click and then see the image. In the meantime, the actual paper record can be conserved and put away, so that minimises the actual use and any further damage to the record. There are also digital standards for preserving records and Mr. Donovan has touched on that.

The digital revolution to which Mr. Donovan referred in his short presentation is very real. It has led to over 100 million records being placed online in the last 15 years or so, but there is also a much greater understanding that genealogy is not just about births, marriages and deaths and parish records. It is really about the records that have survived. We have lost almost the entire 19th century census, so what can we use to track people down? There is a diversity of records available and I would like to emphasise three huge collections that are available, to a greater or lesser degree, to researchers. I have used all of them in the course of my career as a professional genealogist. The first is the Registry of Deeds. That registry is very often misunderstood as being simply legal records and the records of the ascendancy. They are not. The Registry of Deeds contain the records of the Irish middle class. We always had a fairly sizeable middle class and the records cover the entire island of Ireland. If those records were to be digitised, it would transform the record from being a big and unwieldy archive into something that can be searched and be used to trace ancestors. If those records were digitised, we could go beyond simply looking at the townlands index. We would be able to start looking below that level of middle class people who have assets that they are trying to protect, and find people who did not usually have assets and who do not appear in any other records from that time. I am talking about school teachers, small shopkeepers, people who run businesses, the law clerks. These are the approximately 30% of Irish people who were literate and who were then called on to act as witnesses when any of these deeds were being drawn up.

The other point about the Registry of Deeds is that everyone assumes these are simply records of the ascendancy or of people who belonged to the established church. As a matter of fact, when a person registered a deed, it immediately meant that his or her document had priority over an unregistered deed. This meant that right from the get-go, from the day it opened, people who were Catholic, Presbyterian or dissenter made a beeline for the Registry of Deeds to try to guarantee the greatest security possible and keep control of their assets. That is one of the major points to be noted.

Ms Helen Moss and I researched President Barack Obama's ancestry. In fact, he was a Senator when we first began researching, which shows for how long it had been going on. We made significant use of the Registry of Deeds. His family was not wealthy. One branch became super-wealthy or did very well. While his family was not wealthy, it did have assets. These details are not easily available to researchers.

Another great set of records is the Land Commission's records. They are probably the best archival source for the Irish population in the 19th century and one must jump through a series of fiery hoops to gain access to them. Again, I emphasise the Land Commission's records are not about the wealthy. One will find records of estates and landed families, but what I find more important are the details of the rentals and the ordinary people on five, ten or 15 acres. They included farmers, a portion of whose rent was covered by their labour. My family is well represented among these labourers and I am keen to gain access to the records.

The third set of records is the records of the Valuation Office. Deputy Catherine Murphy referred to census substitutes. Many of us have come to use the Valuation Office's records as an excellent census substitute because one can see how long a family remained in an area.

There is another point I am keen to emphasise on diversity. We do not have 19th century census returns, but we do have statistics taken from them before they were destroyed. In the 1841 census some 36.7% of the Irish population was not Catholic. For "not Catholic" read Church of Ireland and dissenter. Genealogy can help us to connect with our own past and have a greater understanding of who we are and from where we came. That cohort is a major part of the Diaspora, with which we are not really connecting. I refer back to the President Barack Obama case. His family were southern Protestants which I emphasise as being an identity quite distinct from that of the Ulster Scots. The people concerned were southern Episcopalian - that was how they were known in the United States - and once they had emigrated to the United States, within one generation they had assimilated and all knowledge of their Irish origins had been lost, as happened in the case of President Barack Obama's family. I do not believe we are reaching out to this section of the Diaspora. Again, that brings me back to the idea that there was emigration from Ireland throughout the 1600s and 1700s. The Irish built America, but they did not simply build the railroads or the great buildings. Often, they were the nation's builders; they were there from the start. I refer the committee to some cases on which I have worked recently. Samuel Ogle was Governor of Maryland in the 1740s. He had spent most of his childhood and his entire early life in Ireland. Richard Montgomery who was the senior general active in the field during the American War of Independence had grown up in Charlie Haughey's old house, Abbeville - surprisingly. This is a section of the Diaspora to which we are not reaching out.

I liked what Senator Labhrás Ó Murchú had to say about bringing the community together. If anything, that is, ultimately, what this is about. We have seen a major increase in interest among Irish people. It is also great to be able to connect with that part of the Diaspora overseas.