Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Members will be aware that there are approximately 13 institutions that archive everything published in the State, including physical documents and books. These institutions are legal deposit libraries. The National Library of Ireland is one, Trinity College Dublin is another, as is the University of Limerick, UL. I raise an issue that has been going on for some years now, which is the inability of the National Library of Ireland, to, for example, to archive the web. In the past, I have met representatives of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment with Senator Norris and Deputy Bacik when the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Bill came before the Houses. The Seanad passed my amendment to that Bill at the time but it was taken out later by the then Minister of State, John Halligan. The issue here is that we are losing material. As the average webpage lasts about 100 days, contrary to the common narrative, what goes online does not stay there forever.

The alarming loss of digital material means that there is going to be a black hole in our nation’s memory. I am thinking about referendum campaigns, websites from all sides of these campaigns and the debates that took place. As even political websites and those of politicians that disappear will not be archived, there will be a black hole in our memory.

In response to Deputy Conway-Walsh, who asked the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media when a feasibility study would be carried out by way of establishing a digital legal deposit scheme for large-scale systematic and sustained archiving of the Irish web, that is, the .iedomain, the Minister said she hoped to bring forward a report in the coming months. There are three possible outcomes to this report. One is that the National Library of Ireland will provide an archive of the .iedomain on-site in Kildare Street. The other outcome is that it will be able to share that online with Irish people and the Irish diaspora. The worst outcome is that the library would at least be able to save it and archive it for now, until we all see sense and archive the web so that it lasts. I will table a Commencement matter on this issue but I want to call on the Government to bring forward this report as soon as possible.

In my last 20 seconds I also want to say that in advance of the project we need to keep the baseline figure for the arts as it is and we need to see the Government coming forward with whatever it wants to propose around a universal basic income. I have my own issues with that idea but I want to see the proposals that the Government has talked about for some time.