Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I support the suggestion that additional space is required, as well as extra staff. When I was a Minister I had responsibility for this area. There is a scholarly interest in the early part of the last century, from 1900 onwards and through the 1920s. Would the Taoiseach agree that the archives for this period should be revisited? Questions have been raised before on this matter. Records on the civil war are not assembled in such as way as to answer scholarly questions either about individuals, groups or parts of the country. That is a great pity. Even though I was a Minister with responsibility for such archives, my attempts to recover records on my father's activities in north Cork, both during the war of independence and the civil war, were only partially successful. I have a feeling there has been a movement away from this period.

If we are to have good social and constitutional histories covering the period to 2016, we will need to examine the state of such records. Some records held in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform cover a 15 or 20-year period during which people applied for pensions from which they were excluded in the early years of the State. The lives of a whole series of people are effectively being wiped out because such files are inaccessible. Since there is nobody now alive from that period, it is worth revisiting the era in view of the forthcoming anniversaries.

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