Claire Santry has a piece on the sales of the Certificate of Irish Heritage (www.heritagecertificate.ie) since its launch at the end of September last year. In almost nine months, some 682 certificates only have been sold, and 58 given away, including to those well known Irishmen Barack O'Bama and Sebastian Coe. The story is at http://irish-genealogy-news.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/nearly-700-certificates-of-irish.html
The Irish Government can continue to sell plastic paddy certificates to anyone who wants to dress up in green, but if it actually invested more in providing the resources to attract people to the country to help them genuinely establish their Irish connection in the first place it could well see more of a benefit to the economy. A good start might be to try to get the nation's Roman Catholic registers digitised and online, as well as a fully searchable version of the civil registration indexes. The 1901 and 1911 censuses, the online probate indexes and the Irish Genealogy website are wonderful projects - but the diaspora could certainly do with a few more of them.
In the meantime, rumours of a free shillelagh with every Certificate of Irish Heritage purchased are completely unfounded. And the idea of a pot of gold with each in the current climate is probably a complete non-starter...! :)
Chris
Check out my Scotland's Greatest Story research service www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
New book: It's Perthshire 1866 - there's been a murder... www.thehistorypress.co.uk/products/The-Mount-Stewart-Murder.aspx (from June 12th 2012)
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