Mr. John Grenham:

I am here as an author, a columnist with The Irish Times and the author of Tracing Your Irish Ancestors. I might seem to be a little lonely here on my own but, in fact, I am a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, a member of the Genealogical Society of Ireland and a big source of profit for the Irish Family History Foundation, rootsireland.ie.

My focus will be on the researcher, the person who is trying to find his or her ancestors, particularly coming from abroad. The relationship between Ireland and its diaspora is utterly unique and this is not appreciated nearly enough in Ireland itself. If one thinks of worldwide figures, only Germany has more people of German origin outside the country than inside. In the case of Germany, there are 150 million persons of German origin outside Germany but there are 90 million Germans. Then one looks at Ireland where there are 80 million persons of Irish origin outside Ireland but there are only 6.5 million of us still here. The disproportion is extraordinary and it does not exist anywhere else on the planet. If one thinks of it, Ireland today has the population of Rio de Janeiro and the Irish outside Ireland would number those in New York, London, Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai all rolled together and then some. We have a unique relationship with the Irish outside Ireland and that uniqueness places an obligation on us, particularly in genealogy, to make it as easy as possible for these people to find their ancestors and to find their way back home.

It is also the reason that genealogy in Ireland cannot be as simple a business as it might be elsewhere. In other words, purely commercial imperatives cannot dictate how genealogy works in Ireland. We have a duty to make it as simple, low-cost and widely available as possible.

Of course, there are economic benefits and people will point them up readily. In my experience, the two Holy Grails for people doing genealogical research are to find the place from which their ancestors left, to actually stand in the field up to their ankles in mud, and to meet any surviving extended family.

The tourism benefits are self-evident. It always has been big difficulty in dealing with public bodies to make a business case to state that if one spends €1,000 on improving genealogical research services here, so many extra visitors will come. There may be times when common sense is more important than a watertight business case. It is common sense - it is as clear as the nose on one's face - that if one makes it easier for people to find out where they came from, more of them will come back. It is as simple as that.

Rather than talk about the great plethora of sources that I would love to see digitised and online, I will focus on the four main sources that everybody doing research on Irish records will have to go through at some point or other. These are the two 19th century land tax surveys, Griffith's Valuation and the Tithe Applotment Books, the 1901 and 1911 census returns, the State records of births, marriages and deaths from 1864, and the church records. The first two of those four - the land tax records and the 1901 and 1911 Census returns - are already online. In particular, the census returns were a revelation to many not involved in genealogy of just how powerful digitisation could be. The other two are more problematic. The General Register Office records are, as my colleague, Ms Máire Mac Conghail, pointed out, coming online in bits and pieces. The standard in general register offices in Australia, Scotland and Northern Ireland is to have these records fully searchable - for births, up to 100 years old; for marriages; up to 70 years old; and for deaths, up to 50 years old. The General Register Office of Northern Ireland is about to do this for the records under its control, which include many areas that are now in the Republic. We will have a situation in which those in east Donegal or north Louth will be able to search for their family history on the website of the General Register Office of Northern Ireland but will have to come in person, sit in front of an index register and work their way through a Victorian indexing system to do research in the South. It is not as if there is a great deal of money required to digitise these records.

The General Register Office already has a full digital copy of everything behind the counter, but it is not available to the public. The obstacle is legal. The Registrar General interprets the law to mean that he cannot make the records available except via the index system that exists. He is probably right. Northern Ireland had to pass a law, with the Queen's assent, to allow it to do what it is about to do. Something must be done about this major source.

The last source is church records. As the Irish Family History Foundation has pointed out, there is a huge database of church records, but it is incomplete. The website irishgenealogy.iehas a large database which is also incomplete. The National Library has digital images of all parish registers up to 1880, but not online. It is surely not beyond the wit of the administrators of this country to bring those three bodies together to create a resource that is up to date and provides record images and database searches. It need not be free. It could be paid for in some form or other by the end user, but it must be done and it must be available.