Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I welcome the capital projects. Do I take it that the Department has no problem in providing capital funding for shared projects? The groups serving Irish emigrants in Britain realised that the buildings they are replacing will be used by a number of groups. The predominant group may well be Irish so the funding may be in the form of capital partnerships and so on. These partnerships will be multi-ethnic.

I entirely agree with the Minister about the pre-1953 issue. The fact is that 1956 is the year in which most people left Ireland since the Famine — 56,000 people left. A quarter of a million people left between 1955 and 1960, so the 1953 revision helps those people.

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