Every county council and local authority in the State should appoint its own archaeologist as a matter of urgency, according to Michael Byrne, whose abiding passion is local history.
The Tullamore, Co Offaly, based lawyer has just published his seventh book on local history. He is convinced many important archaeological sites are in danger because there are no formal links between local areas and the national bodies charged with protecting our heritage.
The quiet-spoken midlander, who is honorary secretary of the Offaly Historical and Archaeological Society, is concerned that, with the pace of development in his native county, valuable sites will be lost.
"The national monuments will be protected all right but there are many lesser known monuments, especially smaller ones, which could be lost forever," he said during the week.
His interest in law grew from his love of history when he was a student in Trinity College Dublin in the 1970s, studying what influenced the entrepreneurs of the 18th and 19th centuries.
"Towns in provincial Ireland developed more or less at the whim of the local landlords, who controlled the landbanks and everything else," he said.
"The development of a town depended almost entirely on whether or not the local landlord wanted to make a statement. Most of them wanted to do that through well-built slated houses which showed a good front to the world.
"Development was based almost entirely on the generosity of the landlord who wanted, in the main, fine slated houses and jails and public buildings in the Greek and Gothic styles," he added.
In the 1990s the development of provincial towns was tax driven but unlike the Dublin Temple Bar development, he said, which had its own landbank, it was much more difficult to achieve the style favoured by the landlords.
His interest in history has resulted in Tullamore having one of the finest reference libraries in any county, with the possible exception of Kilkenny.
That, he said, had created a problem for the society which has hundreds, if not thousands, of documents which he feels must be catalogued and made available to the public. "We badly need a qualified person to come here and put shape on the material we have been given. In fact, we can offer free accommodation to any qualified person who wants to come to Tullamore to catalogue our material," he said.
"What the society would like to do is to put this on disc and make it available to anyone who wants to have it.
"There has been a marvellous explosion of interest in local history in recent years and we want to create a local studies academy here."
He said that in the early 1970s, there was only one booklet for sale on his local town. Now a huge amount of material has been generated for public consumption.
The anniversaries of the Famine, 1798 and now the millennium had triggered a large amount of written material. What was particularly good was that it was coming from local people themselves, he said.
He said nearly half the parishes in Co Offaly had put together publications which would ensure the survival of important material for the generations to come.
Mr Byrne, who has just published The People of Tullamore in the Twentieth Century, is now working with the society to have a new collection of photographs published early this year.
This is from the collection of Brigadier McGann and features interesting material from a photographer called Middleton Biddulph in and around the midlands from 1870 to 1920.
That book will be published next month, and the society has plans to follow this with another book of pictures from the famous Father Browne photographic collection and postcard pictures of the county.
Mr Byrne also chairs the local Enterprise Board, which works on creating employment locally, and is also on the board of the Tullamore Dew heritage centre which shares premises with the society.
The society can be contacted at ohas@iol.ie.