Could we take all archaeological monuments into State Care?

Part of the hill-fort at Brusselstown Hillfort

There are over 138,800 recorded archaeological monuments in Ireland. Some are under state care, ie actually owned by the state and a lot of these are cared for by the OPW. The vast majority aren't but are protected under legislation under the National Monuments Act 1930-2004 with fines and/or imprisonment. The main issue with the state taking ownership of private property is the Irish Constitution. This could be amended by a referendum and the land taken from the various landowners and taken into state care. This would normally be termed "Nationalisation". It would then be up to all of us through our general taxation to care for the 138,800 monuments and adjacent lands. Personally I'm not sure how easy it would be to legally draft such an amendment without affecting the rights of all private property and it may set a precedent for other nationalisations. It may also affect the confidence of indigenous and foreign investors in the country. Alternatively we could try purchase them individually from the landowners, maybe under compulsory purchase. Some of the monuments such as hill-forts can be huge. For example Brusselstown Hill-fort in Co. Wicklow is 230 acres in size. Therefore if we were to take a conservative estimate of 10 acres per monument to include access etc then that would require 1,388,000 arces. At a market value of €10,000 per acre then this would be €1,380000000 or I think €1.4 billion (if someone can check the maths). I suppose that doesn't include many monuments that form part of houses such as castles or just can't be sectioned out without damaging the viability of farms and estates etc. So it would be maybe a lot more than that! I guess you would need the estimate then for the upkeep of the monuments on a yearly basis to see if it was feasible. Obviously I'd love to see it and maybe a idea as radical as this could be looked at and at the same time it would create a very strong heritage industry with tours and the upkeep of all these new monuments in state care.