Executive Liaison Officers' Report 2006

As usual, it has been a busy year for CIGO. Over the past twelve months the two Executive Liaison Officers (Rob Davison and Steven Smyrl have dealt with various issues that have arisen. The most important of these are as follows:

Registry of Deeds

In February CIGO was asked to attend a meeting with Dermot Clancy, head of customer services at the Land Registry (which administers the Registry of Deeds). Rob Davison and myself attended the meeting, which proved to be very informative. It transpired that the request to meet with us was on foot of CIGO's position as Ireland's largest representative organisation in the field of genealogy.

Mr. Clancy made it clear that the Land Registry acknowledges that it holds two important collections of records of use to genealogists. These, of course, being the Registry of Deeds, dating from 1708, and the Land Registry which holds details of land transactions since the 1890s. We were also made aware that even given the upgrading of the Henrietta Street premises a decade ago, they are now simply not adequate any more for the purpose of housing archival documents.

We enquired about decentralisation and indicated that we would not be in favour of the original records being transferred out of Dublin. In reply we were informed that it would not be possible at this time to transfer the holdings of the Registry of Deeds to the National Archives because of issues of space, but that such a move was not ruled out for the future.

In relation to access to the Registry of Deeds records, we learnt that the Land Registry is currently presenting costings to the government for project to digitise the deeds from 1708 to present. Although, in all likelihood the later deeds would be scanned first. The resulting database would be made available to public consultation. We were given assurances that the original records would continue to be made available.

The records of the Land Registry (which date from the 1890s) have already been scanned and can be viewed on the Internet, although the website is a pay-per-view site.

National Library

In June we made a submission to the National Library in answer to its call for readers' views for the creation of the Library's Strategic Plan for 2007 to 2009. We highlighted two areas of concern, access to Roman Catholic parish registers and the Library's important collection of electoral registers.

In relation to parish registers we suggested that there was now great need for the Library to consider microfilming Roman Catholic parish registers beyond the original cut-off date of 1880 – which is now over 126 years ago. Also, we requested the Board of the Library to look again at the Diocese of Cloyne's iniquitous access policy to the filmed registers from that diocese's parishes. This policy has been imposed upon the Library by the Bishop of Cloyne and should be resisted. The ongoing complete lack of access to the films for the Diocese of Cashel & Emly was also raised.

The Library has a fairly complete set of annual electoral registers for the Republic dating from the middle years of the 20 th century. A similar collection for the city of Dublin is held by the Dublin City Archives and has recently been digitised, creating a fully searchable database. We asked the Library to look at whether it would be appropriate to consider such a project for its own holdings.

General Register Office of Northern Ireland

Later in the year, in July, Rob and myself made a short, joint submission to the GRO in Belfast, in relation to its latest consultation document about the modernisation of civil registration in the province. On this occasion CIGO had felt that it was imperative that as many as possible made submissions to GRONI about its draft policy document which included clauses to restrict public access to certain data in registration records compiled less than one hundred years ago. In this instance, CIGO's work ensured that over eighteen submissions were received by the North's GRO, each indicating an unwillingness to accept any diminution in access to civil registration records in Northern Ireland.

Shortly after, in words careful not to suggest any form of climb down, GRONI announced that its draft policy would now not include proposals to curb public access. The decision to announce this was no doubt influenced by the fact that CIGO was not alone in reminding GRONI that not only are all Northern Ireland civil records already available through GRO Dublin, but that the LDS Family History Library already holds microfilm copies of all Northern Irish civil records for the period 1922 to 1959!

Website

Finally, as you have already heard, CIGO's long heralded website is almost completed and I too would like to thank Irish Genealogy Ltd. for its very generous financial assistance in achieving this goal.

It is our hope that the website will allow CIGO's friends to follow our campaigns on a more regular basis and that it will make membership of CIGO more attractive to both Irish and overseas genealogy organisations. No doubt the website's bookshop will also help us to sell more copies of our publications and those of our constituent organisations.

You will have noticed that CIGO has not been able to produce its newsletter, CIGO NEWS, in recent times. In future, news items will be posted on the website and although we admit that this is not the same as producing a newsletter we do feel that it is a more manageable approach to keeping our readers and friends abreast of the latest developments in Irish genealogy.