Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)
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Question 286: To ask the Minister for Social Protection if, in addition to the civil registration indexes, she will complete the project of digitising the records themselves; if so, the timeframe involved; the work that has taken place to date; the locations of the work that is being done; the cost of same; the way she plans to offer it to the public; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [23208/11]

Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)
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Question 287: To ask the Minister for Social Protection when the civil registration indexes which have been digitised will be available through the CRO website; the reason they were made available to the Church of Latter Day Saints in advance of going live nationally; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [23209/11]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 286 and 287 together.

The position in relation to the digitisation of historic civil registration records is that all the records are in digitised format and all index records are in electronic format. All birth records from the commencement of the registration of births in 1864 are available on the live computer system. Marriages from 1920 and deaths from 1924 are also available on the live system. The remaining records – marriages from the commencement of registration in 1845 to 1919, and deaths from the commencement of registration in 1864 to 1923 - are currently stored on a separate database at the headquarters of the General Register Office (GRO) in Roscommon. These records require a substantial amount of data cleaning and the linking of marriage index records with the digitised image of the register entry pages before they can be migrated to the live system. Preparations for the completion of this project are currently underway, including upgrading of the ICT infrastructure which hosts the data and the applications required to work with the data. The completion of the historic data project is an extremely labour-intensive task requiring a high level of skill, great attention to detail and extensive quality control. As the Deputy will appreciate, resources are very limited and preliminary estimates suggest that the completion of this project using the available resources will take approximately four years. All of this work will be done at GRO headquarters in Roscommon. The cost of the project to date is of the order of €10 million. Initial indications are that the costs of completing the project are of the order of €1.5 million.

The question as to whether the civil registration indexes will be made available through a website will require careful consideration, both from an ICT viewpoint and a legal viewpoint. Currently, access to indexes is governed by section 61 of the Civil Registration Act 2004 and there are conditions surrounding such access. Any relaxation of these conditions will involve consideration of data protection, privacy and identity fraud issues.

Access to civil registration records by the Church of the Latter Day Saints began in 1960 on foot of an agreement between the church and the GRO and is entirely unrelated to the GRO modernisation programme. The church required access for religious reasons and the 'quid pro quo' was that the church would give the GRO a microfilm copy of the records for its own use. This arrangement was discontinued in the 1980s when microfilm technology became more widely available.