This is a subject in which I have a very deep personal interest. As Deputy Donnellan said, I was involved with him in preparing the Bill. For me it represents the culmination of three years' work on the subject, putting down parliamentary questions and gathering information. I feel deeply that we need to modernise our national monuments legislation if we are to protect our heritage from destruction. People do not realise the extent of the threat to our national heritage. In the course of my contribution, I intend to indicate the size of the threat in some cases.
The Minister has said he intends to present his own Bill and that that, in itself, was sufficient reason to throw out our Bill. I would remind him of the proverb that "the best is the enemy of the good". If the Minister waits until he has what he considers a perfect Bill we may be waiting and waiting and waiting. We will never achieve perfection in anything concerned with legislation.
Deputy Donnellan acknowledged at the outset of his contribution that this Bill was not perfect but at least we have raised some issues, perhaps the most important issues. We have said that if the Minister allows this Bill to go to Committee Stage and if he wants to amend it, by adding to it or subtracting from it, we would welcome such amendment. It would be a great pity if, at the end of this debate, the Minister were to refuse to allow this Bill to go to Committee Stage and voted it down in principle. If, at the end of Committee Stage when we have teased out the various points, the Minister still considers the Bill is an inadequate framework and is not capable of being amended adequately, he could vote it down then. However, to refuse to allow it to go to Committee Stage, to refuse to allow it to be discussed in detail, indicates a closed mind on the subject and that is not the right approach for the Minister.
Section 3 is an important one which deals with the protection of various wrecks off our coast. There are approximately 20 wrecks along the Irish coast that were part of the ill-fated Spanish Armada. In recent years with new technology in diving some of these wrecks have been under serious threat. I shall quote in particular the case of the "Santa Maria de la Rosa" in the Blasket Sound, in the sea off the Minister's native county. It was said in an article in The Irish Times dated 16 May that this ship was plundered by divers, that material was taken from it in a most unprofessional manner and sold for commercial purposes. This wreck was deprived of almost all its important and valuable items; for instance, cannons were sold abroad and have disappeared forever from this country. The Minister of the day was powerless to do anything about it because there was no legislation that allowed him to exercise any control on excavations that took place below the high water mark.
We also possibly have a number of Viking long boats that may have been wrecked off our coasts. To my knowledge their location has not yet been identified but there are bound to have been some such wrecks. Although this Bill does not cover them, possibly there are other items such as the remnants of settlements that may have been submerged by coastal erosion that exist below the high water mark. There may be important geological specimens of historic interest below the high water mark but under present legislation nothing can be done to prevent these items being plundered. This Bill is intended to increase the power of the Minister—our political opponent—to deal with the problem. We are trying to improve his powers to allow him to do his work. If there is any example of a Bill that is not politically contentious this is one example. We are trying to help the Minister to do his work better, to prevent materials being plundered in this way.
I should like to quote from a letter from the Royal Irish Academy that was addressed to me in December 1977. It stated:
It is thought that a certain amount of surreptitious plundering of wrecks is also carried out but the final destination of the finds is, of course, not known. The Academy is concerned that any search conducted on wrecks of archaeological significance should be properly controlled and that all finds of national importance should be recovered and made available to all interested parties.
That most respected body have said they want protection for our wrecks. Yet, we have no power at the moment to give such protection. In many cases the wrecks are wooden vessels that are very well preserved. They afford us an opportunity to see in an undisturbed condition evidence of the lifestyle of the 14th and 15th centuries. Any evidence found on land is liable to have been disturbed with other cultivations that have taken place but wrecks at sea are almost entirely undisturbed. Thus, they are even more valuable than what may be found on land.
In section 4 we are proposing that the Commissioners of Public Works be required to publish an annual report giving information about excavations they have licensed under the powers they have already. There is considerable evidence that there is need for more public information and for the tightening of controls on excavations carried out under licence by the Office of Public Works. In the past ten years they have spent about £500,000 in grants to archaeologists to carry out excavations. These archaelogists are bound by law under section 23 of the National Monuments Acts, 1930, to report promptly to the National Museum any objects that they find in the course of their excavations.
In reply to a question put down in 1977 I discovered that, of 45 excavations which had taken place under licence from the Board of Works in the previous ten years, in 15 cases the archaeologists who had received substantial sums of public money to carry out their excavations had failed to lodge the reports of their excavations as they were bound to do under section 23 of the Act. There is a moral obligation on archaeologists funded by the public, who find objects of importance to lodge them with the National Museum when they have finished their research so that they are available to the public for display and study. In reply to Question No. 314 of 18 October 1977 I discovered that in relation to the 45 excavations, most of which were carried out with the aid of public funds, only six archaeologists had lodged in the museum material found. In six other cases some of the material was lodged and in 33 cases no material was lodged in the National Museum. Some archaeologists may have found nothing. Indeed, one extensive excavation in Mayo revealed a lot of valuable information but no objects were found. There are other cases where the archaeologist is still working on his material and may not have time to process and pass on the objects. But in some cases the excavations are completed ten years and still material has not been lodged in the National Museum. That is a bad example on the part of archaeologists. Section 4 of this Bill would require the commissioners to give us a report every year on the extent to which the legal terms of these excavation licences are being fulfilled, so that any case of somebody not reasonably lodging material or producing reports of excavations will be brought to public notice.
The next section is concerned with the guardianship of national monuments. One of the purposes of this Bill is to ensure that the Board of Works will have the power to take over an inhabited building and become the guardians of it. It is only as the legal guardians of the building that the Board of Works have any power to spend money in maintaining it. The preservation of a farmhouse with people living in it is far more valuable than allowing the farmhouse to become a ruin and then the Board of Works trying to preserve it artificially. There are many buildings and farmhouses being lived in at the moment which are of immense historic interest and they should be preserved. At the moment the Board of Works are completely powerless to do anything as they can only step in when the building has become a ruin. Could anything be more ridiculous?
We should try to preserve not only big castles and imposing buildings, but farmhouses and other houses, the types of dwelling in which the humblest people lived in the past. We want to keep evidence of the entire lifestyle of our people even up to relatively recent times. Thatched houses are disappearing by the thousand, and in ten years' time perhaps there will be no thatched houses. In ten years' time certain types of farmhouses will have disappeared without trace because of modernisation. I do not say that every old building should be preserved but we should preserve specimens of each type so that in 200 years' time we will be able to show how people lived now. It would be ideal if the Board of Works could go to a farmer or a householder living in one of these houses and say that they wanted it preserved, that they wanted the person to continue living there and that they would provide the money and would continue to provide the money to maintain it so long as the person maintained the house in good condition according to certain specifications. That is what this Bill is trying to do. It would be a pity if this generation were responsible for allowing things to disappear without trace simply because we did not get around to drafting the legislation to do it. I am convinced that if Deputy McEllistrim had the powers which this Bill would confer he would use them. As a result of the delays there would be in passing alternative legislation the Minister would probably not have the power for years, whereas if the Minister adopted this measure he would.
Section 6 of the Bill is concerned with giving responsibility to the National Museum to look after the objects found as a result of excavations on shipwrecks. It is merely a routine amendment extending the power to make preservation orders.
Section 7 is concerned with preventing people from using items from our historic past for purely private gain. At the moment if somebody digging his garden finds something of historic interest he is by law required to report it to the National Museum. In many cases the people who find such objects will not know the value of them or their significance and they are likely to show it to someone who knows something about it who will perhaps offer £10 for it knowing it to be far more valuable. The man can then proceed to sell it abroad or to an antique dealer and make a profit from it. The anomalous thing is that, although the finder is obliged by law to report it to the National Museum, the person who buys it from him even though he is more likely to know the value of it, is under no obligation to report the fact that he has come into possession of this valuable item. That is a loophole that should be closed and this Bill will close it. This will ensure that items which are of importance to us will not be exported abroad for profit.
I attended an auction in Slane Castle which was concerned with fine art at which the National Museum were represented. I was told by the people organising it that many of the items on sale were Irish items which had probably been illegally exported and sold and bought abroad and were now being brought back with the possibility that the National Museum might buy them at a high price. These items should never have left the country and the National Museum should have bought them in the first place.
We should not have the situation where the National Museum goes along to an auction either here or abroad where items of Irish national heritage are on sale. If they have not got enough money they cannot buy them and the objects end up in a museum in New York or Washington. That is not satisfactory. These items should not leave the country but should be preserved here. If the provision I am seeking to incorporate in the Bill was put into effect, whereby anyone in Ireland who comes into possession of a historical object of importance is obliged to report it, these items would never have left the country and the spectacle I have described of items coming back here so that the National Museum will have a chance of buying them—and if they do not they go back out—would not happen.
The powers which exist to control exports of historical objects are totally useless. Under section 14 of the 1954 Act the Minister may declare an object which in his opinion is an archaeological object to be an archaeological object and if he does so that object may not be exported. There is no control over the export of any object that the Minister does not specifically declare to be an archaeological object. On 18 October 1977 in Question No. 299 I asked the Minister if he had declared any objects to be archaeological objects since that Act was passed 23 years previously. He told me that no object was declared to be an archaeological object in accordance with the terms of the National Monuments Act, 1954. In other words, there is no control whatever on exports of archaeological objects because the Minister never got around to declaring any of them to be archaeological objects, because he never found out about their existence in the first place because of the lack of the provision which I am seeking to insert in the Bill. Although controls exist on paper they are totally useless.
We are also concerned with the control of the use of electronic devices or metal detectors to find items. I have noticed in the papers many advertisements by people promoting the sale of metal detectors encouraging people to use them and giving the impression that if they are used one could hit the jackpot and become a millionaire overnight. The fact is that 90 per cent of items which would be ancient and found by metal detectors and dug up as a result of their being identified are totally valueless in a financial sense. A lot of them are only iron nails or some form of agricultural implement, spearheads and so on which one could not sell because they are made of iron and not of any precious metal. If they are found and dug up, they are taken out of the context in which they originally lay side by side with other objects. If at a given level in the soil one found a certain type of nail in conjunction with certain types of wood and other remains, which would indicate that they were deposited there at a particular time in history, one might discover that a certain type of agricultural implement or nail was in use 200 years before one had thought it was. If an unprofessional person using a metal detector discovers these, he just digs and digs and throws them completely out of their proper context. All one gets is the nail and one does not get any of the objects that lay beside it which may have been destroyed by the person shovelling. One does not know anything about it except that it is a nail. It could be a nail which was used for one purpose or another purpose but one would not know for which purpose it was used by virtue of the fact that it had been dug up in this way. If it had been excavated professionally one would have valuable information about the item, which in itself is financially of no value to anyone. Not only does the person digging it up get nothing out of it, because a nail is not something one can sell, but they destroy the possibility of other people getting useful information.
Metal detectors should not be used except under licence. The Board of Works should see to it that if they are used to find historical items it should be done under licence by reputable people who undertake to comply with certain conditions such as reporting the objects found, recording the way they find them and so on, or in assisting archaeological excavations. They should not be used by untrained people who are out for a treasure hunt. It is not sufficient to say they should not be used around a national monument. There may be items of immense value in areas we do not realise are national monuments. There may be bare fields under which there may be a settlement of 1,000 years old completely obliterated from view by subsequent deposits of soil and one would not be aware of its existence. If someone comes along with a metal detector, gets a sounding and starts digging in the process they may find some nails but may destroy something which is irreplaceable and may never exist again.
Agriculture is also a problem. About 15 per cent of recorder field monuments have been destroyed in the course of land reclamation. In Meath alone a survey in 1970 showed that 56 monuments were destroyed in the course of land reclamation. In the last ten years I am sure that more have been destroyed. There is need for control on that. We spend a lot of money on archaeological excavations but the public have not had the significance of these explained to them. More work should be done by the Board of Works to encourage the dissemination of information in a popular form about archaeological excavations so that people will realise what is there and not seek to destroy it.
The penalties under the legislation are completely out of date. At present the maximum fine one can receive is £50 for destroying a national monument. That is a totally insufficient fine. It should be about £1,000. The Bill proposes to bring the fines up to date so that if a national monument is destroyed people will be penalised for so doing and will be deterred from doing so again. I am also concerned at the delay on the part of the Board of Works in publishing the archaeological survey. In the last five years they have completed a survey of three counties—Louth, Meath and one other. The surveys have almost been completed.
The Office of Public Works at public expense carried out detailed archaeological surveys of every item of archaeological interest in two or three counties but they have not published any of it. That information, garnered at public expense, has not been published and I am not confident that it will be published in the foreseeable future. The Minister of State should give a direction to his officials to publish this information within the next six months. It is available in his Department and it is only a question of having it printed and published. There is no reason why information obtained at public expense in relation to our national heritage in the archaeological survey should remain unpublished as is the case. I believe strongly that legislation is needed urgently in this area. The Bill we have put forward goes a long way towards meeting the case for improved legislation and the Minister should allow it become law, or, at least, to be discussed in Committee.
