Dr. Sharon Greene:

I thank the Deputy for her question. I am pleased to talk about this. It also ties in with the whole question of monument protection and questions that were asked earlier by Deputies Ó Snodaigh and Cian O'Callaghan. There have already been opportunities to make people aware of the registers that are in existence and I spoke about those in my statement in 2018, with all the publicity about new sites, crop marks and that sort of thing. We tend to have to wait for those opportunities for us to be in the news to promote these things. We know from these particular cases that when we have the opportunity to tell members of the public to look at this wonderful stuff and show them how we report it and where they can find information about it, they react. They go, report more and explore their landscapes, as we saw in recent years during the pandemic. This is incredibly important. It ties into what was said earlier about raising awareness of archaeological sites for their protection in the landscape.

It is important that we let landowners know what is on their lands. It is very easy to say ignorance is not a defence when it comes to destruction and damage, and that is absolutely the case, but in some cases it is a fact that the landowners do not know what they have. I have been listening to these discussions and the urban landscape has been to the fore. However, a considerable amount of our archaeological record is in the rural landscape and not all landowners are aware of what they have on their land or what it means. One way to raise awareness of the register and awareness of our archaeology, as I mentioned in our suggestions, is to have archaeologists embedded in the community, be they in local authorities or be they regional community archaeologists. Such archeologists would engage with people and can proactively go out into the landscape and engage with landscape stakeholders.