I move:
That Seanad Éireann, calls on the Government to take immediate steps to fill, on a full-time and permanent basis, the position of Director of the National Library and requests the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands to outline her Department's pro posals for the development of both the National Archives and the National Library and to indicate what steps are being taken to ensure that the archive material currently being held in State bodies which have been or are about to be privatised will be preserved in the same professional way as applies to all State papers.
I welcome the Minister to the House and the debate this evening. It is always a great pleasure to have the Minister in the House. I know archives and the preservation of historical records are subjects dear to her heart. I welcome the opportunity this debate gives us and the fact that we can have it in an air of calm, without confrontation.
The National Archives and the National Library are two of the most important aspects of our cultural heritage. We have not always treated them as well or as generously as they deserve but in recent years there has been a new awareness of the importance of putting resources and expertise in these two important areas of national life. I hope this evening's debate will give us an opportunity to hear some of the Minister's plans in this regard.
It is great pity that the post of Director of the National Library has not been filled on a permanent basis and that this situation has continued for some time. In saying that I am conscious of the huge contribution made by the last acting director, the former Secretary of the Department of Finance and by the current acting director, Mr. Brendan O'Donoghue, former Secretary General of the Department of the Environment.
Mr. Brendan O'Donoghue deserves particular credit because major initiatives have been taken during his time – he is still there – as director. He played a key role in bringing into existence the buildings programme announced recently by the Minister of State, Deputy Cullen, on behalf of the Minister, Deputy de Valera. The library now opens for longer hours, not long enough but for longer than was the case for many years. The new genealogical service has been brought into operation and has to date been a great success. The library's new photographic archive in Temple Bar is complete and is a splendid addition to the library's facilities. A new technical services building has been completed. I pay warm tribute to Mr. Brendan O'Donoghue for his achievements. It would be very welcome if he could become the Director of the National Library on a full time and permanent basis. However that is not my point.
My point is that it has not proved possible to fill the position. The reason is very simple. It is that the level of salary offered for the Director of the National Library is not enough to attract the top professionals in the business. To be specific, the Director of the National Library receives a salary ranging from £41,000 to £47,000 per year. The salary of the librarian in Maynooth goes up to £62,000. The salary of the librarian in DCU goes up to £62,000. An associate librarian in UCD is paid more than the Director of the National Library. I wish to draw the position to the Minister's attention. I do not intend to labour the point but we should persuade the Department of Finance to unloose the purse strings to do what has to be done. Other issues such as relativity may be involved, as is often the case in these things. It is a disgrace we cannot pay the Director of the National Library a salary commensurate with the calibre of person required to fill the position.
On the National Archives, great progress has been made in the past few years. The Bill introduced by the former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald to set up the National Archives was a pioneering piece of work and an important deed of foresight. By and large the archives have worked effectively and successfully. It is a great pleasure to work in the archives in Bishop Street and experience at first hand the professionalism, dedication and courtesy of the staff. It is encouraging to see much recent research and many publications which probably would not have been possible without the facilities provided by the National Archives. What are the Minister's plans for the new buildings which are needed for the archives and, more important, for the training of staff? There is a shortage of properly trained archive staff to effectively run the library.
The second question I want to raise, and I know the answer to it, is whether Government Departments are complying with the obligation under the law to supply their papers to the National Archives. Under the law all Government Departments are required to deposit their papers in the National Archives and some Departments are seriously behind in doing this. The Department of Agriculture and Food is a particularly bad offender and the Department of Education and Science does not have a good track record. Other Departments also have not fulfilled their legal obligation to ensure that papers are transferred in a regular and organised way to the National Archives.
Are Departments complying in a user friendly way? In some cases they are not. Papers are simply dumped there in an unusable way, putting great extra strain on the staff of the National Archives. It is important that all Departments realise the extent of their obligation under the archives Act as a depository of valuable historical material and take care to ensure that the transfer of such material takes place in a timely and efficient way. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that because she is in a position in Cabinet to jog the memories of those Departments who are not complying.
My third point concerns State boards. Our history is, in many ways, a history of our great State enterprises – the ESB, RTE, Bord na Móna, Bord Fáilte, Aer Lingus – which have helped to shape Irish life over the years. There is a gap in the legislation. These boards are not obliged to look after their archives, nor are they obliged to transfer their records to the National Archives. This is a serious omission in the legislation and the Minister should bring in amending legislation – or I would be happy to do so in a Private Members' Bill – to ensure that they come under the purview of the National Archives.
A further problem arises in that some of these bodies are about to be privatised. In the cost-cutting climate which will follow privatisation, there will be a great temptation, especially if the new owners do not have a strong sense of Irishness or of their organisations being part of Irish society, to simply dump all of these records. If that happens it will be a disgrace and will stand as a deed of shame which will seriously hamper historical research over the coming years. I am thinking of bodies like the IDA which shaped industrial policy over a period of 50 to 55 years. There is a whole range of State boards whose papers are in danger of being lost. I ask the Minister to review, as a matter or urgency, the whole question of what will happen to the papers of the State boards. Can legislation be brought in to oblige them to comply in the same way as Government Departments, especially those that are about to be privatised? We need encouragement and sanctions to make sure that this happens.
The proliferation of archives has been one of the healthier aspects of Irish life in recent times. The Minister has a very special interest in this. Her late grandfather ensured that his enormously rich treasure trove of papers would be available to historians for their use over the years. They are now in the archive at UCD alongside the papers of many of his colleagues, McEntee and Aiken, and those of his adversaries, Mulcahy and McGilligan. All the papers are there, and they are of enormous value to historians.
We have seen also the development of the Military Archive. Commandant Peter Young deserves enormous credit for what he has done there. It is proposed to move the Military Archive to Collins Barracks and, given the Army's long association with that barracks, it would be a very fitting place for it. I would ask the Minister, however, not to try to convert part of an old building into an archive. It will be cheaper in the long run to have a custom-built building. Given the technical problems of adaptation and all that could go wrong, it is false economy to try to rig out an old building rather than using the best technology available and starting from scratch.
In regard to tape recordings, film archives and so forth, RTE has been doing a very good job of late in ensuring that valuable film archive material is kept. Might there be a case for moving all that to a central location so that there is, as far as possible, one national archive? Has the Minister a view on whether one central archive would be preferable to a proliferation of smaller and not always well financed archives? Under a Bill brought in two or three years ago, all local authorities are now obliged to have an archive of their material. I know this relates to a different Department, the Department of the Environment and Local Government. However, I would be interested to know whether they are keeping archives, whether it is appropriate to have county archives or whether regional archives might be a better way of pooling resources. Can the Minister shed any light on that?
It is always a great delight for somebody who does research to go into a well run archive, whether in the National Archive in Kew Gardens in London or in Washington, and read material that probably was never intended to be read. There may be a slight sense of the voyeur about it, but there is great pleasure in working in a well equipped archive which is professionally run. Our National Archives and the other archives I have mentioned have attained that state. I am concerned, though, given the ravages of the Freedom of Information Act in certain sections of the public service where people are virtually afraid to write to each other, where a document which was meant to be confidential can be in the public domain legally within a short space of time, that the historians of the future will have enormous difficulty because everything now is done by phone or by e-mail. More and more public servants find it useful not to write things down, not to leave a record, but rather to do as much business as possible off the record. It is one of the down sides of the Freedom of Information Act. Also, even though we are more literate in some ways, fewer people write diaries or long personal letters committing their thoughts, experiences or observations to paper. The historians of the future will, therefore, have a much more difficult time researching and writing accounts of what happened and why.
I thank the Minister for being here tonight. I wanted to raise these issues because they are important and I wanted to do so in a non-contentious way because I know the Minister has the same concern as I and everybody else here to ensure that this aspect of our national culture and heritage is given the priority and urgency it requires.