Ms Virginia Teehan:

We do not have a standardised system. The interpretation of heritage can be a bit disparate. Different groups are interpreting sites. It may be connected to whoever is responsible - the OPW, a local authority or a community group. It is something that we could do. We could look at developing standard guidelines. I am from a museum background. When you train in curatorship, you spend classes talking about the length of captions, the size of fonts and all of this sort of training which helps interpret objects. The interpretation of places is important.

Technology is really helpful. Apps are very valuable. With "Know Your 5K", we developed during Covid an online system where people uploaded significant heritage features or just what they felt was important about their 5 km onto a website, and that was expressed as a map of Ireland and people could clink on different sites. It was popular. We are looking at advancing that to having it on an app. Obviously, it is much better if people have it when they are walking around on their phone. It makes sense.

One of our key projects is the National Biodiversity Data Centre. It is excellent at translating its work into digital form. It has numerous apps for recording species and plants and monitoring butterflies and plant forms. It is successful. We would like to transfer much of that use of technology more generally into heritage. However, to answer the Chairman's point, there is a piece of work to be done on guidelines for standardisation of plaques.