Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

First, I welcome this Bill. There are good parts in it. The Minister of State has a tendency to come into the Chamber and reference the pre-legislative report and process, which I think is very good. I want to acknowledge the input into the pre-legislative process, especially by An Taisce, Archaeology Ireland, the Local Authority Archaeologist Network, LAAN, and others. We have a habit of pointing out that most of the recommendations in the pre-legislative report have unfortunately not been taken on board by the Minister of State. Only two of the nine recommendations, according to the Bill Digest from the Library and Research Service, were taken on board.

That being said, I welcome what the Minister of State said in his remarks about the Valletta Convention and about tabling further amendments on that on Committee Stage. That is an area in which I have a very particular interest, so it is positive that the Minister of State is listening to the concerns about that. I very much want to see what is in those amendments. The Minister of State has not given us any detail in his opening comments about what those amendments are likely to look like or what sort of substance will be in them. That is a very important part of this. If the Minister of State has any information on that, I urge him to give it to us during his closing remarks or, if not, as soon as possible. That will obviously impact the amendments we will table as well, because of all the issues in the Bill, that is the issue to which I want to draw attention. I will be addressing it quite considerably in my remarks.

There is no question - other Members have drawn on this - that we in this country place huge value on heritage when it comes to tourism, economic development and marketing the country. Yet, that is not always carried through in how strongly heritage is protected in practice. The Heritage Council's report from the survey it did in 2001 on archaeological features that were at risk is absolutely damning. It showed that 34% of the State's archaeological monuments have been destroyed since 1840 and that the destruction was continuing at an alarming rate. When we are looking at this Bill we should be incredibly mindful of that.

There are approximately 1,000 monuments on 750 sites that are in the ownership and under the guardianship of the State. However, the remaining 129,000 monuments are in private ownership and vast numbers of these are not accessible to the public. That is very concerning. Access to monuments is not an issue that is addressed in this Bill. There are situations where there has been access over the years to monuments that are of very high value and for which there is huge public interest. Then, landownership has changed and that access was cut off. In my own local community, there is Aideen's Grave Portal Tomb, which is a monument that dates back thousands of years. Until recently, walking tours were able to get access to that monument. The new owner, which is a commercial entity, has now stopped that access for walking tours.

Why would it not want guided walking tours, a very responsible form of access, to have access to a key monument?

Since 2007, only nine prosecutions have been taken by the Director of Public Prosecutions on the recommendation of An Garda Síochána for alleged offences under the National Monuments Acts 1930 to 2014. Given the level of destruction that has been documented as having gone on, the fact there has been only that level of enforcement actions shows the scale of the issue.

We have to do everything we can to protect national monuments. The legislation must be robust enough to serve us well for decades to come, something to which the Minister has committed. We cannot rely simply on the goodwill and interest of individual Ministers; it must be robust enough to protect our heritage if a future Minister without sufficient interest comes along. It is significant that if we were to ask when the most recent archaeological discovery by accident took place in Ireland where a decision had been taken to preserve and even restore the find, we would not get a lot of answers from people.

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