Today I was deleting email from the old Genuki digest. As I said this morning the Heritage Centers DO tend to be controversial. This is one Genuki subscribers opinion of them. "Subject: IRISH HERITAGE CENTRES To enlighten Lisa and others who may be interested. The Irish Genealogical Centres were set up with the idea of having all computerized databased records of church records availabe to anyone on one large Nationwide database. The idea was that you could visit any Genealogical Centre in Ireland, they would look up your inquiry on their National database and bingo!!, up pops your ancestor. Great Idea, but not really feasable. The people employed to carry out this mammoth task, were inexperienced to say the least. The records were transcribed and put to computer databases by teenagers who were taken off the dole registers for this purpose. The teenagers had no real interest in what they were doing, the result being, that names were transcribed wrongly, as were the townland addresses and any other information in the church records. Also, bored teenagers added their own personal comments and remarks to those records, and in many cases, those persons in charge did not check the finished databases for errors. Enough to say, that any records from those centres should not be accepted as true and correct. For the most part, the staff who were selected to oversee these youngsters, also had no trainig regarding setting up such a Network, to ensure that all information from all centres in Ireland could eventually be put together into one large National database. The centres used different software programs, and different computers for the task. Mackintoshes were used, as were IBM Compatibles and older computers which were not compatible to either of those computer types. The project was started around 1985, and it was not until 1990 that they got themselves together and realised that the project would not be a success at a National level for the reasons I stated above and for other reasons which I will not bore you with. The project collapsed, and it is now left to the individual centres to give out information relating to their own areas. They do not encourage visitors to their door, as it is too time consuming to conduct a search in that environment. Also, I suspect that now they are better equipped and more knowledgable regarding the type of work the are doing. Most of the centres will now be in the process of going back to the beginning and starting all over again. Thus another reason why they prefer that the general public do not land at their doorstep. What I would ask now is, who benefits from the monies taken in by these Genealogical Centres? The churches do not get anything for giving their records. No other persons or agencies gains anything from these project excepting the committees who are responsible for overseeing them. What do they do with the money they make? That's what I would love to know".