Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I appreciate the Minister of State rushed from the Dáil to take this Adjournment debate.

I am concerned about the National Archives which performs a vital role that is often forgotten. Its purpose is two-fold: to care for past public records, some of which are, for good reason, closed to the public and to superintend the storage of archives in public institutions and to arrange for their final transfer. Public access is a by-product of these functions which, while secondary, is an important one for historians, genealogists, journalists and others. I am particularly concerned that new legislation in this area, emanating from the Department of Finance, is based purely on saving money rather than on cultural issues.

There are indications that the Department wants to introduce technical legislation aimed at amalgamating three institutions, including the National Library, the Manuscripts Commission and the National Archives. The amalgamation of these institutions under one umbrella featured in the programme for Government 2008. Draft legislation appears imminent. There are issues with such legislation in terms of reorganisation and resources. If a new structure is called into existence for the three bodies, new legislative provisions will be necessary to preserve the powers of the director of the National Archives, which are statutorily defined in the National Archives Act 1986. The director's responsibilities will be totally undermined if he or she is to be answerable to a new hybrid management summoned out of thin air unless the statutory authority for the care of Government records is properly provided for. While additional resources are not likely to be allocated now due to the downturn, future needs must be recognised and spelled out so that the needs of these institutions are not trampled underfoot at a future date when funds become more available.

What progress has been made on the legislation to amalgamate the National Library, the Manuscripts Commission and the National Archives? Will this legislation preserve the full statutory powers of the Director of Archives? On the critical resource front, is the Minister seeking advice on the scale of the problem and the scale of needs? What scale of staffing and accommodation is required? Who superintends the archival records of the Departments in choosing what documents to keep? It is normal for Departments to move their paper regularly. How do the Departments decide what should be kept? It should be professionally and independently decided, if possible.

In an ideal world, I would like to see the National Archives have the extra professional staff it really needs, extra support staff and new accommodation to specific standards. There would also have to be fire proof accommodation to preserve those important documents.

On the digitisation of archives, electronic mail and e-mail are two of the biggest archival issues on which I would like to get the Minister's views. Digitisation has a real value for records, both protecting fragile paper documents with a large demand and by easy access reducing the number of readers, notably genealogists. However, it is expensive and can only be justified for a limited range of record categories. Phoenix suggested recently that €4.5 million had been already spent on the 1911 Census. Apart from the fact that the originals would have to be retained, it is not feasible on cost grounds for most record categories.

A letter in The Times Literary Supplement recently noted that the Kew archives in London proposed to put a deal of money into digitisation of certain categories in high demand and to cut back on the curating of other categories. On the future plans for digitising of archives, will budget cuts affect such digitising? I am interested in the Minister outlining proposals on digitisation of archives for the future.

E-mail poses enormous problems at several levels. I asked a senior civil servant recently how she managed things and she replied that she put print-outs of important letters on her files, but that record keeping in general in her Department was slack.

The registries, which used to organise centrally the files of each Department, have collapsed in Belfast as well as Dublin. It appears that over the past decade and a half, the old central registry system has broken down in the various Departments, and the public should be made aware of what, if anything, has replaced it. In the Department of Health and Children, it was the demands posed by the Freedom of Information Act 1997 which, in the absence of any working arrangement, made necessary a system of civil servants seeking a file number electronically for papers on a new subject. How that system or the system, if any, in other Departments works in terms of the good order of files, the preservation of the integrity of the archive as a whole and meeting the conditions of the National Archives Act 1986 is a subject on which enlightenment for the public would be welcome.

The David Kelly case in London - the Hutton report - in the UK was interesting in archival terms in the sense that a coherent picture was based largely on e-mails - whether by hard copies on file or by fresh print-outs, it was not clear. It seems that we are falling seriously behind considering the digitising of archives at Kew, the Public Records Office in Belfast or even the Irish Virtual Library and Archive Project, IRVLA, in UCD archives. Other archives are investing a great deal in digitising archives. We would surely save space and many man hours if records were digitised and available to the public in that way. I want to know who is superintending the electronic archival records of the Departments in choosing what documents to keep.

If any doubt remains about the alarming situation, the report of the Joint Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women's Rights Sub-Committee on the Barron Report which considered the Barron report on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974 should remove it. The subcommittee was "Astonished that better care was not kept of these documents". It called, in March 2004, for an investigation with statutory powers to explore the reasons for loss or destruction and to try to recover documentation. The resulting report in March-April 2007, the so-called McEntee Report, is a damning exposé of a near-total lack of archival control in several Government institutions.

The National Archives are in a unique position, however as a sort of Cinderella. This is in part because its primary function is the humdrum and silent one of looking after the welfare of the records of the State, and access by the public is secondary to that concern. We have a very valuable asset. It is difficult at this time to allocate the sums of money to do everything we want to do, but I emphasise that this is a real challenge. I would like to get some answers to those questions.