I am grateful for the opportunity to outline for this House the current position of the Ordnance Survey Office. One of the commercial realities now faced by the Ordnance Survey Office is that the funds allocated by the State must be expanded in the most cost effective and productive manner; another is that the needs of the market must be supplied and yet another critical one is that consumers of the products supplied by the Ordnance Survey Office must be prepared to pay for that product.
The present position is that the Ordnance Survey Office spend about £8 million a year, including capital investment, but they effectively earn only about £2.5 million a year in revenue from all sources. Therefore, we have a State business supplying a product at an annual loss of some £5.5 million a year to the Irish taxpayer.
Against this background, it was necessary to review the operation of the Ordnance Survey Office and a very careful and detailed review took place in recent years. There were two principal questions to be answered: first, were the Ordnance Survey Office producing the products the market wanted and, second, is production handled in the most economical and cost effective way? The answer to the first question was that one major product required by the tourist and security industry was not being supplied — the 1:50,000 series — and the Ordnance Survey Office were instructed to start producing this.
On the second question, the answer was in the negative. Until recently maps were produced completely by field observation and the results were manually compiled and stored in the Ordnance Survey Office's head office in the Phoenix Park. Over the last number of years, technological progress has allowed for the field results to be translated digitally by computer into map form. The 1:50,000 series, to which I have just referred, is produced by way of extremely expensive and complicated machinery which translates aerial surveys into stored data in the computer, so field work is reduced to a minimum. In addition, the pace of technological progress in the whole area is so rapid now that the whole procedure for producing the other mapping products — the large scale urban and rural maps — will change dramatically. Much of the basic work can be done by the use of imagery, consisting of both aerial photography and of satellite data, for compiling the basic product, with the result that the need to have personnel laboriously observing and measuring data in the field will be virtually eliminated.
Because of this, the management of the Ordnance Survey Office decided to transfer all the field staff back to their established headquarters in Dublin. A problem then arose because some of these officers, despite being required to make themselves available for transfer if and when required, expressed unwillingness to move. At this point I should mention that staff on field work get the benefit of generous field allowances. These allowances are, in part, intended to compensate field officers for the liability to move to different work locations from time to time. Also, staff in receipt of field allowances are not entitled to these allowances or removal expenses on returning to Dublin.
In order to minimise the disruptive effects on staff and on the work of the Ordnance Survey Office, the Minister for Finance agreed to the establishment of six small regional offices to accommodate as many of the field staff as possible. Following recommendations submitted by the management of the Ordnance Survey Office, offices have been sanctioned for Cork, Ennis, Tuam, Kilkenny, Sligo and Longford and the field staff in question have been given the maximum flexibility as to whether to return to their established headquarters in Dublin or to transfer to the new regional offices. Removal expenses for transfer to these new headquarters has also been agreed. Unfortunately, with the best will in the world it is impossible to ensure that every field officer would be able to remain at his present location. I thought that everyone involved would have liked to transfer to Longford as that area has become so important in recent times. The fact is that the nature of the work and organisation of these offices dictate that only six offices can be established; any further offices would simply not be viable.
The Dáil adjourned at 9.05 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 11 March 1992.
