Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will speak to amendment No. 7. I remind the House that we are talking about the digital deposit. Institutions such as Trinity College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland have a responsibility to archive every physical publication in the State. We have not yet designed a digital deposit scheme to protect what is put online within 100 days. What is put online is vulnerable to disappearing.Essentially, we are not archiving the digital memory that we put there, so what goes online during election and referendum campaigns and what goes online generally is not archived. The solution is to allow the National Library, for example, the ability to sweep the .iedomain and to archive that for future generations because what goes online is so disposable. An amendment was passed in the Dáil, which provided that within 12 months of the enactment of the Bill the Government would bring forward a report on the feasibility of establishing a digital legal deposit scheme. The delay in passing the Bill has also delayed that measure. It is a source of anxiety for me that we have not dealt with the issue.

We passed an amendment on Committee Stage in this House that would legislatively allow for the creation of a digital deposit scheme. We met officials from the Department since then and I understand that we are putting the cart before the horse in passing the legislation without having the regulatory framework in place. Because I believe so strongly in the need for a digital deposit scheme, I want the scheme to be a success and I do not want it to be vulnerable to challenge. Could the Minister of State provide an update on the current position in respect of archiving digital material and not losing our national memory? Most web pages disappear within 100 days, so time is not on our side. That was called for in the Modernising Copyright report published in 2013. I support the amendment to remove what we achieved in the previous Stage, but I ask the Minister of State for a commitment that we would have sight of the heads of a Bill or a regulation that would allow the National Library to sweep the .iedomain and have freedom to do so and the protection of the law in order that we can archive our digital memory. Time is not on our side. I support the amendment, with a heavy heart.