Jimmy Deenihan (Kerry North-West Limerick, Fine Gael)

While the Gathering event is primarily a matter for my colleague, the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, I am conscious of the tourism potential of genealogy for attracting the diaspora to our shores. Therefore, I welcome my fellow Minister's initiative. He has stated he expects the Gathering to be one of the biggest tourism initiatives ever to be undertaken in Ireland. It will be a year-long event in 2013 when people at home and abroad can play a part in the country's recovery, potentially bringing in 325,000 extra tourists and providing a major economic stimulus.

The Gathering is a hugely important and timely initiative for the tourism sector, one which my Department and the national cultural institutions which operate under its aegis are very pleased to support and participate in. In that context, officials from my Department are working closely with their colleagues in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and agencies within its ambit - Fáilte Ireland and Tourism Ireland - on cultural, genealogical and heritage tourism matters. I see the Gathering as an excellent opportunity to enhance genealogical tourism.

Genealogical records made available through my Department have been extremely popular with the public at home and abroad. The success of the digitisation project of the 1901-1911 census is the best proof of this. The website, hosted and managed by the National Archives of Ireland, has proved to be phenomenally popular, with over 648 million hits and more than 13 million individual visits to date. The certificate of Irish heritage has now been linked with the site.

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