Martin Mansergh (Tipperary South, Fianna Fail)

Another point which is totally under-estimated and to which digitisation may offer a solution in some aspects, though not all, is that in the modern age we generate vast quantities of paper. I remember when I was in the Department of Foreign Affairs in the 1970s and working on part 19 of a file on a particular subject, if I wished to retrieve parts seven, eight, nine and ten, for example, it was a devil of a job to do so. People may castigate us about documents being lost, but there was a tsunami of paper. It is a major challenge for every organisation to manage this issue. Some operations are relatively simple to computerise, while it is possible to keep certain records on disk and so on. However, the nature of documents produced by the Government is such that we are betwixt and between paper and digital information. There is onsiderable unease, given that we are living in the digital age, that even more records will go missing than was the case in the paper age.