Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Cathaoirleach for selecting this Commencement matter, which I also raised as a Commencement matter in 2021. I have heard of no progress to date, so I hope that today the Minister of State will have an update for me.

The National Library of Ireland is a depository where publications are sent to record the history of the State, but they do not have the same legal responsibility when it comes to digital content and websites. Today, I want to quote the former director of the National Library of Ireland, Sandra Collins, who was before the Oireachtas committee on culture back in 2021. The basis of my contribution today will be this quote. I am blue in the face from raising this issue, so I think her words will be more powerful as a former director of the National Library of Ireland. This quote is on the Oireachtas record, but I will again put it on the record of this House.This is from Sandra Collins, who is a former director of the National Library of Ireland.

In 2019, we did a full domain .ie crawl. Approximately 230,000 Irish websites end with .ie. With our technology partner, we captured a snapshot in time of every one of those websites. It is a resource that researchers and historians in the future will take as a record of what the country was saying during 2019. The act of collecting those websites put us [the National Library of Ireland] in breach of copyright legislation. We have that resource securely locked away, but we cannot provide access to it for researchers, historians and people in Ireland who are interested in it.

Each year that we do not do that, 50% of Irish websites vanish forever or are changed so that they are unrecognisable from what they are now. The records of referendums and general elections are all gone. In 2022, it will have been three years since we collected .ie domain data. In consultation with our board, we will not be able to take the risk of collecting it because of the risk and responsibility that puts on the library in terms of having breached copyright legislation. It would be useful for the report to go to the Cabinet for consideration and that the report recommend a legislative amendment to copyright legislation, which is the responsibility of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. [Obviously, the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media has a particular responsibility here also]. That, in time, would allow us to capture those websites and our contemporary history before it is gone forever.

We are losing websites at an alarming rate. I had an amendment to the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Act 2019 passed on one Stage, but it was taken out on a later Stage. As it stands, though, we are losing websites at an alarming rate. These represent our national memory, and the longer the Department fails to introduce an amendment to the 2019 Act, the more websites and the more of our memory we will lose for future generations. I hope the Minister of State has an update for me today in terms of a legislative amendment coming down the tracks.