I propose to take Questions Nos. 15, 18 and 32 together.
The National Archives has accommodation needs both short-term and long-term which are in the process of being addressed.
The headquarters of the National Archives is located in premises at Bishop Street in Dublin, but at present not all of those premises is available to it. The National Archives also still occupies the record repository of the former Public Record Office at the Four Courts in Dublin. All the storage space currently available to the National Archives in those two buildings is fully occupied.
Under section 8(1) of the National Archives Act, 1986, Departments of State are obliged to transfer their departmental records to the National Archives to be made available for public inspection when they are 30 years old, unless exempt under other sections of the Act. Due to shortage of space, the National Archives was unable to accept most of the records for 1966 which were due for transfer by Government Departments in 1966. It is also at present unable to accept the backlog of older records which are overdue for transfer by the Departments of Education and Finance.
The overall premises at Bishop Street are in principle sufficient to meet the storage requirements of the National Archives until well into the next century. There are two needs to be addressed, however, before this position is achieved in practice. The first and more immediate need is to acquire the space available on floor 1 in the front block of the existing premises which is at present occupied by a section of the Government Supplies Agency which is part of the Office of Public Works and, accordingly, the responsibility of the Minister for Finance. I understand the arrangements being made by the Office of Public Works to allow the vacation of this area have taken longer than envisaged but that urgent attention is being given to the matter to finalise the situation and facilitate its fitting out for National Archives purposes so that it may take in all overdue records including those up to 1967. The second issue relates to proposals for dealing with the longer term accommodation and storage needs of the National Archives. In this regard the warehouse to the rear of the present building has been identified as offering the optimum solution.
The immediate priority in this regard is the carrying out of planning and preparatory work for this adaptation. It has been agreed that such adaptation should be undertaken and, in this context, the Minister for Finance announced in the recent budget that the necessary planning and preparatory work for this project will be undertaken by the Office of Public Works in 1997.
On the basis of a feasibility study carried out for the Office of Public Works a total of four options were considered for meeting the future needs of the archives. The option which would supply the maximum space to the institution has been costed provisionally as being of the order of £13 million at current prices. The various options are currently the subject of discussions between my Department and the Department of Finance.