Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Looking back at "Reeling in the Years", sometimes snippets of it captures the imagination. A little sketch can capture a year's history very quickly.

Another aspect that was brought to mind when, as a committee, we visited Raidió na Gaeltachta and saw the huge archive there is that it is not the archive of the programmes, it is the archive of all the recordings of all those characters who played music and who sometimes sat and played three or four hours of music. It is all recorded. Maybe just ten minutes of it went out. The same would probably be true of RTÉ. Do we give full access to the unedited material? I do not know what is in it, possibly the unscripted programmes. All of that is interesting.

Regarding time, is it similar to the National Archive's 30-year rule? Anything in RTÉ is archived immediately so that it is accessible because there is now the player. What about the other material in the background that is kept by every institution? There has to be some type of protection around full access especially for those unguarded moments off air or whatever that could cause severe damage to somebody's reputation. While it was not intended, it might have been said in jest, but we do not have the context if all we hear is a recording. I am supportive in that respect.

The other aspect is that of selling. At the moment, RTÉ gains some type of income from selling the rights or sharing the rights with companies that create programmes.

4 o’clock

It is probably not much; I am not sure. The BBC makes quite a bit, but in the bigger scheme of things, it is probably not that much. If everything is put up free to access, the public might not be interested in looking at it if it is part of a programme, or they might be, but we have to look at whether that interferes with RTÉ's funding model.

Who is responsible? We have quite a number of national cultural institutions, some of which are specifically involved in archiving material. There is the National Library, the National Archives, National Photographic Archive, Irish Film Archive in the IFI and, across the road from this building, there is the Irish Traditional Music Archive. There are a number of competing interests. Do we want another one? RTÉ is already an archive. I am not denying that, but at some stage something becomes historical and there is a degree of funding and expertise and, as Deputy Costello said, a degree of love on the part of those involved. They love their project, are passionate about it and very good at it. Is it better to centralise the archive? As was mentioned, TG4 is doing its bit. I presume, some local radio stations also have archives. Is it better to centralise our digital and broadcasting archives in the one place? RTÉ might be the body to do it but that poses the other question, which we are dealing with, about the funding of RTÉ now and into the future. Is it part of the funding model that the State takes this on? How much will this cost? How much will the digitisation of Raidió na Gaeltachta cost? There are a lot of old cassette tapes and some reels. Raidió na Gaeltachta does not have the full funding. I heard the Minister mention that moneys will be available but it is a big undertaking for any of these organisations. We will have to have an idea of the cost, who will pay and out of what budget. Will it be RTÉ's budget or a separate cultural budget under this Department or a one-off budget to deal with the backlog? Ultimately, we will be starting from today and addressing an historical or legacy backlog.

In the future, an advantage of living in a digital age is that most of the stuff is already archivable or quickly archivable. You do not have to stand at a scanner scanning everything in so it can be read in a digital format, as happened during the decade of centenaries with the military pension records. Millions of pages of those records were scanned. I think it is the greatest number of hits on any archive in Ireland. People around the country were checking out their ancestry. It would be the same if it were announced that RTÉ's huge catalogue were to be available digitally. How can we stop people downloading it for themselves and using it without the permission of the owners, which are RTÉ and the original actors? The Minister mentioned the archiving of Irish language material. Only last week at the committee, Meta representatives said that if they had another 1,000 hours of Irish language material, it would be possible to have automatic subtitling based on new AI models that convert language via recognition of spoken word into subtitles. There can be benefits. All of that has to be worked out. I am not against the Bill.

On the decade of centenaries, I congratulate RTÉ on the huge amount of work and material it made available during the decade of centenaries, which again captured a lot of people's imaginations. Through newsreels, it pointed to different events that happened in that period. One set of newsreels which I do not think has been digitised, if anybody can find them, are the Gael Linn newsreels from the 1930s. Every single week in every cinema in Ireland, a newsreel was shown by Gael Linn. Digitising those newsreels would be exceptional because they were in Irish in a lot of cases and captured what happened throughout the country in the 1930s.

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