Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

On the general point that Deputy Rabbitte has raised, over the life of this Government, with no urgings from anybody, we have made a large number of decisions that have helped emigrants, including helping local authorities with housing, dealing with many aspects of health, improving the DION grants, establishing the consular service in the United States to fund organisations that we previously did not fund etc. There is a whole range of these issues. I am well aware of the matter Deputy Stagg has pursued. I raised it in London some years ago and made an issue of it with the RTE people. I asked for the technicalities to be investigated. That is an issue with others. There were issues about television schemes and travel schemes. It is not possible to address some of these issues under European Union law, but we have followed them up. Under the broadcasting Bill being prepared, RTE's public service remit will be broadened to include broadcasting to the Irish abroad, subject to EU approval on state aid. That is the point Deputy Stagg asked me to follow up, and Deputy Rabbitte raised it last week.

This concerns the question put down by Deputies Rabbitte, Ó Caoláin, Kenny and Sargent because it had long been said that it was difficult to do it this way. The Federation of Irish Societies and others asked me some years ago to consider how we might deal with this issue. We decided that any Irish citizen born on the island of Ireland would be eligible.

The bounty will be paid retrospectively to any centenarian who previously applied and would have qualified if the new arrangements were in place. There will be administrative discretion as to whether it will be paid to centenarians who did not apply previously but would have been eligible if the new arrangements were in place. I do not see any difficulty in that, unless there is some strange reason not to pay them. In all circumstances, the bounty will be paid only to centenarians who are alive and will not be paid to the estates of any persons deceased. In response to Deputy Rabbitte, we will ask the embassies and consular services, which will operate the scheme, to do so proactively.

Some time ago, when I debated this with the Federation of Irish Societies, I commissioned a statistical exercise to see the figures for people born in 1904. In that year 103,811 people were born in the 32 counties. An actuary calculated that 625 should be alive on their 100th birthday.

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