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g a z e t t e
april 1991
The Future of the Land Registry
and the Registry of Deeds
by
Catherine Treacy,
Registrar of Titles
The following is the text of a lector
to the Lawtech Exhibition, 1990.
I am delighted to be here today
participating in this very useful
exercise which has been, as one
has come to expect, so well
planned and organized by the Law
Society.
The combined Registries,
ue.
Land Registry and Registry of
Deeds, have been the subject of
various criticisms over the last
number of years which highlighted
the negative aspects of the
Registries, such as the arrears
situation and the consequent
delays in registration.
I do not propose to dwell on such
matters, except to say that signi-
ficant effort has been directed
towards the elimination of these
arrears in key areas, the benefits of
which I would hope some of you
are experiencing already. My brief,
however, is to look ahead and
convey to you what I see as the
future role of the Registries.
The fact that I am here to talk
about the future of the Registries
is a definite indication of my con-
" . . . significant effort has been
directed towards the elimination
o f . . . arrears in key areas
fidence that there
is
a future for the
Registries and a good one at that. I
consider also that a Seminar which
is part of a technology exhibition is
an
appropriate
forum for this ex-
ercise in looking ahead as it is my
firm belief that the successfulfuture
of the Registries lies in their ability
to adapt to the technological era.
The services which the Regis-
tries provide are record-based.
Every application made for registra-
tion involves the retrieval and
updating of the folio. It may also
delivered by The Registrar of Titles
involve the retrieval of a map or
previous instruments.
There are approximately 100,000
applications for registrations made
in the Land Registry yearly. Many of
these would involve a number of
folios. This statistic gives a clear
indication of the enormity of the
task of retrieval alone.
That, however, is only part of the
picture Before an actual application
for registration is made, or indeed
in some cases where no application
is subsequently made, folios and
instruments are requested by our
clients for inspection, copying
purposes etc. When the demand in
this area is added to the actual
applications, the total demand for
folios comes to approximately
2,500 per day. Even if the error rate
in the manual re-filing of these
folios was kept to a half of 1%, that
would involve the misfiling of
around 12 folios per day. With a
record base of 1.25 million manual
folios and growing at the rate of
approximately 20,000 per year,
finding these possibly misfiled 12
folios per day would reduce the
task of finding the proverbial needle
in the haystack to child's play by
comparison.
It is not just a problem of volume
that we have to cope with however;
there is a continuous problem
caused by the multiplicity of
demand. It is not just that these
2,500 folios are needed daily in one
area alone; many of these folios will
have been requested simul-
taneously for a number of purposes
e£. copy folio, land certificate,
inspection etc. The paper folio like
other physical objects can however
only be in one place at any given
time, and it is impossible therefore
to cope satisfactorily with the
multiplicity of demand.
Our business in the Registries is
therefore tailor-made for taking
advantage of the speedy access
and multi-access facilities which
technology offers.
This has been proved in the
Dublin Region of the Land Registry
where all of the folios are now
computerised. The computerised
programme has been extended to
the Western Region where all new
folios opened since January 1987
are computerised.
Being a firm believer in proper
planning and research so that
implementation can then take place
smoothly and efficiently and also
believing totally that technology
can only succeed in increasing
efficiency when it is linked into and
co-ordinated wi th the proper
organisation of a business, one of
my first acts on taking up office in
April of this year was to set about
drawing up a Strategic Plan to
determine future strategy in the
Catherine Treacy
160