Vol. 226 No. 2
I move:
That a sum not exceeding £290,250 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1967, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Valuation Office, the Ordnance Survey and certain Minor Services.
I do not know whether I can indict the Minister for Finance in this matter. We are conducting an ordnance survey on a peripatetic basis exclusively. I believe we are the only country in the world outside the underdeveloped countries in which that is being done. I believe that even in many of the undeveloped countries an aerial survey has been initiated by the various powers which used to administer these areas. I have noticed in the discussions of Estimates and Bills by a variety of Ministers, declarations of intent by several Ministers to conduct limited aerial surveys for the specific purpose in which their Departments are primarily interested. If the Ordnance Survey would co-ordinate all these individual ministerial interests and determine to conduct a comprehensive aerial survey themselves, money could be saved. What is infinitely more important, however, is that the aerial survey could be conducted in the appropriate season and carried out at the appropriate angle for the purpose for which it is required and in the weather conditions which would make the survey most valuable.
Ordinarily it might appear that the appropriate time to make an aerial survey would be in the summer or spring but oddly enough, apparently the very reverse is true. The appropriate time to make an aerial survey is when trees are substantially defoliated which means it has to be done in the late autumn, the winter or early spring. Secondly, an aerial survey done without the presence of sunlight loses a great part of its value on account of the absence of adequate shadow. Thirdly, an aerial survey done from straight down from the observing aircraft loses a great part of its value because it does not reveal the impact of shadow. It must be done at a proper angle. Deputies will have seen recently the lunar photographs brought back from the television apparatus on the lunar probes made by the United States of America and the discovery of shadows cast by some of the protuberance observed on the moon has resulted in very interesting speculation as to the nature of the objects observed.
I am primarily interested in this from the point of view of its archaeological implications. I am sorry to say that in this House I have been a voice crying in the wilderness. We are sitting in Ireland on the greatest archaeological treasure house in the world. That seems to be an anachronistic thing to say when we think of Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor and the traditional locations which are thought to have been the greatest mines of archaeological remains. This island, however, had the unique experience of never having been reached by the Romans and the result is that we have historical remains scattered all over the country unaffected by the impact of 400 years of Roman civilisation, such as the impact on Great Britain and the rest of Europe, most of Asia Minor and a considerable part of Africa as well. The tragic fact is that while I have been speaking on this subject today, some of these inestimable treasures have probably disappeared. There is not a single year that passes that the normal agricultural operations in the preparation of the soil do not obliterate certain archaeological remains which we ought to be concerned to preserve and the tragedy is that it could all be preserved for posterity by an aerial survey.
I should say that over 80 per cent of the archaeological monuments which an aerial survey would reveal would be fully identified and described by their appearance in the survey. We do not need to excavate every ring fort in Ireland. We do not need to excavate every archaeological trace that appears on the aerial survey map but there would be about 20 per cent which could be promptly marked and protected. The owner of the land could be notified: "If your ordinary husbandry requirements interfere with this, will you notify the Museum so that the appropriate investigation can be made before you disturb this particular find? Just tell us and we will do all that is necessary". Deputies will have read in the newspapers within the past month of some public-spirited farmer who was in the process of eliminating from his land one of the most important burial sites in the country but simply because he was a sophisticated person when he came upon what appeared to him to be an unnatural assembly, he called up the Garda who notified the Museum and the Museum sent along archaeologists and the necessary records were made and photographs taken. However, five out of ten people encountering that obstruction would simply have swept it away and we would never have heard anything more about it.
The tragic fact about all this business is that a great many people do not attach the slightest importance to it. There are very few Deputies from rural Ireland who have not themselves seen archaeological monuments actually disappearing in their lifetime. I have seen a considerable part of the mediaeval finds at Lough Gara, where the Annals of the Four Masters were written, disappearing in my lifetime. It is now under the care of the Board of Works. That did not take place until a good deal of it was gone. The Board of Works have now taken over the Ormonde Castle in Carrick-on-Suir. People now realise what a precious mediaeval remains that is. When I first saw that, it was in the process of being carted away, and if the Board of Works had not taken it in charge and restored it, it would now be gone.
There are, however, thousands of prehistoric monuments which are there for everyone to see and which are being daily destroyed, and nobody is even aware of it. I again draw the attention of the Minister for Finance to the fact that there is evidence of this in the Department of Agriculture which came to us fortuitously. I was trying to get an aerial survey as far back as 1950 and I was being blocked by the Department of Defence. I was trying to demonstrate that the peripatetic survey, no matter how diligently carried out, was not adequate for the purpose of identifying archaeological remains. I managed to get a limited aerial survey of Croghan in County Roscommon, the home of Ailill.
All to one side, like the town of Croghan.
This is not the town of Croghan. It is the town of Kings where Ailill and Maeve lived. It is the place whereon the Táin Bó Cuailgne started. On the peripatetic survey, there were six or seven sites recognised; on the aerial survey, there were close to 50, the existence of which was then unknown. That could be reproduced in nearly every archaeological area in Ireland and the astonishing thing is that there are archaeological remains in places that nobody has any notion of. I remember in the course of my operations in relation to some drainage work down around Lough Gara the discovery of the crannogs in which Lough Gara happened to be peculiarly rich. That was not directly related to the aerial survey but I could draw an analogy: an aerial survey would do for the whole country what that drainage scheme did for Lough Gara. It would throw up the archaeological remains which at this time are wholly unknown. May I draw an analogy again in order to illustrate the catastrophies that can happen? Before we could get there—and we lost no time —to have the crannogs of Lough Gara surveyed correctly, two youngsters went out in a boat to one of them and spent the day throwing every loose stone they could find into the lake. Practically everything they threw into the lake was a human artefact. It was an evening's amusement for them to go out and make these things skim across the lake. These human monuments are being destroyed every day and we have no record of them.
If it is true, as I believe it to be, that restricted aerial surveys for a variety of purposes associated with the Department of Lands, the Forestry Division, and the Department of Local Government are at present being undertaken, could the Minister for Finance not undertake to co-ordinate them and add whatever sum is necessary to get the thing done completely? Once done it need never be done again. It is there for all time.
I believe the Department of Defence will inform the Minister that for the ordinary purposes of training, pilots must be put in the air from time to time. Surely right reason demands that, if they must be put in the air and must be kept flying to keep them efficient, to keep them accustomed to air operations, a scheme be devised whereby at least part of their work would involve flying in connection with these aerial surveys. The Minister for Finance should insist on the Ordnance Survey retaining expert advice in the matter of archaeological surveys bearing in mind the question of season, weather and angle to which I have referred.
This thing once done would be a monument and a treasure forever. It could have its repercussions. There are a vast number of learned foundations in the United States of America some of which have already come here. They are located all over Europe and Asia. They engage in excavations of a wide variety under benefactions provided by the universities, not only for the purpose of increasing the sum of human knowledge but for the purpose of giving their faculty and students an opportunity of carrying out archaeological work in the field. I do not doubt that if such a survey as I have suggested were undertaken and could be made available to the learned institutes of the world, we would rapidly get applications from many universities for permission to conduct investigations for the purpose of recording these ancient monuments adequately and recovering from them whatever treasures they may contain. From every point of view, this is an eminently desirable thing. It puzzles me sometimes how it is that 20 years has elapsed since I first became Minister without my having succeeded in achieving this purpose. I never give up hope, however. It took me 20 years to shift the home for children on remand from Marlborough Street to more suitable premises.
I did that.
If the Minister did it, it was an admirable thing to do. I thought it was the President who did it. The President was one-time Minister for Education on an interim basis and I sent him on a pilgrimage down to Marlborough Street; he came back and told me that if he had been committed there himself, he would not have considered it such a bad place. We fell out over it but ultimately my view prevailed. The Minister for Finance now claims credit for that. He seems to think I have an edge on him. I have no such thing. My sole concern is to reform him. The thing I have been urging for so long he glories in having done—more power to his elbow. Here is something else to which he might turn his hand, but this time, I hope, with diligence and care.
Occasionally, I have listened with a great deal of sympathy in this House to similar eloquent pleas put forward by Deputy Dillon and, indeed, subsequently acted on some of his suggestions, but I fear the reaction to my efforts was the opposite to what I would have expected it to be. I am not so sure that the atmosphere created today is one in which I would be inclined to listen very sympathetically to any such plea. However, I can tell the House that the Army Air Corps is in fact already co-operating in an archaeological survey of County Louth.
And we may hope in due course it will extend itself to the whole country?
We shall see.
