CULTURE SHOCK: While Official Ireland fiddles with legislation to amalgamate national repositories of priceless information, thousands of documents sit on pallets in unsuitable warehouses, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

PROBABLY THE single most successful cultural project in the last five years in Ireland has been the project by the National Archives to digitise and make available online the 1911 census. It began in 2007, when the Dublin records went online. Antrim, Kerry and Down followed in 2008 and all the other counties became available last August. The public response has been phenomenal. Up to last January, there had been 165 million hits on the site, with 5.5 million users logged on. About 60 per cent are from the Republic, 30 per cent from the UK (including, of course, Northern Ireland which is covered in the census) and the rest from North America and continental Europe. It is hard to think of any cultural project by a public institution that has had such an impact in such a short time.

Some may object to the use of the term “cultural” in this context. It is true, certainly, that an interest in one’s own genealogy usually begins as a kind of egotism. (How many generations did it take to create me?) But in fact any kind of engagement with the census quickly becomes both humbling and imaginative. It brings us back to one of the basics of all human culture – a sense of human continuity. It helps us to locate ourselves in time – an act that is all the more necessary in our postmodern culture in which there is only one tense, the everlasting present. And it forces us to imagine lives that were different to our own, to feel at once our deep connection to our ancestors and our distance from them.

The census project is also an education for non-historians in the crucial importance of archives – the preservation and making available of the record of the past. What the census does for the family, the larger archive does for the nation. It allows us to examine, and perhaps to decode, the DNA of our society, our State, our economy, our political culture. And while the census project shows both the capacity of the National Archives to do excellent work and the public appetite for what it has to offer, the depressing reality is that public policy on the archives is currently in an unholy mess.

This year, the annual release to the public of Government records under the 30-year rule had to be severely curtailed because there was simply no room for much of the new material. Some had to be retained by the Government departments in question and some was put into storage. More than 100,000 documents are now kept in a warehouse at the back of the cramped archives building in Bishop Street, Dublin. The warehouse has no proper environmental controls and the material is piled on wooden pallets, making it very difficult to access.

The redevelopment of the Bishop Street site to tackle these problems has now officially been abandoned. It was described by Martin Mansergh, the junior minister responsible for the Office of Public Works, in the Seanad in January as “currently not affordable”. The best he could offer is the temporary response of moving Land Commission records to another site to free up some space and providing some more off-site storage in other State-owned buildings.

As well as these immediate problems, there are major long-term issues that need to be addressed. What is Government policy on the digitisation of archival records? More urgently, what is the effect of the move, in public institutions, away from paper-based records and towards e-mail? What is being done to preserve the electronic record? In the Seanad recently, Feargal Quinn stated that “the registries, which used to organise centrally the files of each department, have collapsed in Belfast as well as Dublin. It appears that over the last decade and a half, the old central registry system has broken down in the various departments.” This contention seemed to be supported by Mansergh (who, as a trained historian, actually understands this issue). He noted that “the nature of documents produced by Government are such that we are betwixt and between paper and digital information. There is a considerable unease, given that we are in the digital age, that even more records will go missing than was the case in the paper age.”

Not only, however, are none of these issues being addressed, but Government policy is actively preventing any attempt to do so. It is persisting with a madcap scheme to merge the National Archives, the National Library and the Irish Manuscripts Commission into a single body. Martin Mansergh promised that this “complex” legislation will be introduced this year. At best, this process is irrelevant: it will produce no new resources and no practical solutions to the crisis in the archives. At worst, it will weaken the archives still further by burying them within a larger bureaucratic entity.

Either way, no one has produced any coherent account of the reasons for the merger.

While we wait for this whim to work its way into some kind of legislative proposal, however, nothing else can happen. The few tiny cells in the official brain that are ever devoted to a question so petty as that of the archives are entirely occupied with the mechanics of the merger, trying to think up the reasons for a policy that has already been announced.

The National Archives Advisory Council is, by law, the body that ought to be coming up with a strategy to deal with the present crisis. It does not, however, currently exist. Even though the law states that “the Taoiseach shall” (not “may”) appoint this council, the Government has simply refused to do so since the last council’s term of office ended in November 2007.

Policy on the archives, as on so many other issues, has swung from the grandiose (years ago, it was to get an “iconic building”) to benign neglect to what is now beginning to look like malign neglect. A cynic might think that our rulers had some kind of perverse attraction to collective amnesia.