Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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No, I like going through the records. I am one of these nerds. Something that jumped out at me is the statement that there is a significant appetite for high quality online cultural material. There definitely is. The pilot cultural digitisation scheme from 2017 to 2022 will be continued. There is also the digitisation of the 1926 census, which several of us have raised over the years. It is good there is funding for it and it is in train. There is another issue on which perhaps the committee will write back to the Department. It is with regard to records held in a different location, namely, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. These are the records of the Land Commission. Money was made available and there was an announcement on these. They are a real treasure trove.

There has been resistance. They exist North and South and the records prior to 1922 are open in the North but closed in the South. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine hold the records but they are of significant cultural value. Money was made available specifically for this but when we drill into it we see it will not deliver anything in the short term. It would be useful if we could write and ask about it. There is a set of working records. Can we ask the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to liaise with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine on the Land Commission records and a timeline for their digitisation? These records get down to a granular level whereby individual families can be tracked. They are of great historical importance. I would like the Departments with responsibility for culture and agriculture to speak to each other to try to get a decent timeline that does not mean it will be 30 years in the future.