THE LAUNCH of a new national genealogy service that will charge people for every public record accessed has been criticised as a "betrayal" of the long-established tradition that public information in this country should be available free of charge.
The new all-Ireland central database of genealogical records was launched yesterday by the Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism, Séamus Brennan, and the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, at a ceremony on the Jeanie Johnston, the replica Famine-era sailing ship moored in Dublin.
The website, sponsored by the Irish Family History Association, contains 8.6 million birth, baptismal and deaths records from the 1600s to the 1900s obtained from a variety of State and church archives.
However, Fine Gael spokeswoman for Arts, Sports and Tourism, Olivia Mitchell, said that it was very regrettable that the new genealogy service was designed to be a commercial one with people being charged €10 for every single item of information.
"The gathering and digitalisation of the parish records was done at public expense and it was always envisaged that this kind of public information should be made freely available to the public.
"It is a complete break with tradition and practice that an important aspect of our national archives should be subject to a charge.
"We have prided ourselves on free access to our archives, to our national museums and to the National Gallery. I am surprised that the Minister should lend his name to this betrayal by performing the launch of the online service," said Ms Mitchell.
She said that an online service was long overdue.
But Ms Mitchell called for the information to be given to the National Archives as an integral part of the public information service it provides.
She added that she had no objection to the Irish Family History Association charging a fee to people who commissioned it to carry out research, but it was utterly unacceptable that Irish citizens be charged for accessing their own family records assembled at public expense.
The association said in a statement that the bulk of the computerisation of genealogical material had been completed by county centres and that the collation of many millions of records as a searchable database online was a remarkable achievement.
So far, 22 county centres had made their databases available online and it was planned that further centres would be added, the association added.
