Unlike most countries, Ireland has no formal scheme to honour the contributions of its citizens. Pierce Brosnan, Bob Geldof and Terry Wogan are among a list of Irish citizens who in recent years have been given government permission to receive honours from the United Kingdom.

Winning all party support for an Irish honours system is likely to prove extremely difficult. Although Labour backed the idea when Ahern raised it in 1999, its leader Pat Rabbitte yesterday described the Taoiseach's response as "a lot of blather".

"We don't need to ape the British system. We do have organisations that quite properly pay tribute to people, such as the ESB/Rehab People of the Year Awards, " Rabbitte said. He warned that establishing a system on a party political basis would leave open the potential for "awarding gongs" to people because of their political associations. "I'm not sure there is a need for it, " he said.

But Finian McGrath called on all the parties in the Dail to back the idea. He said it comes up regularly with community groups and charities that they would like to see some official recognition for people doing fantastic work in their communities. "I would call on all parties to put away their political baggage and do it in the national interest, " McGrath said.

The Dublin North-Central TD said he accepted the validity of Rabbitte's concerns, but argued these could be overcome by establishing an independent commission of five or six people to "make the decisions on merit" as to who should be awarded.

The notion of an honours system has been raised many times before.

Five of the six Fianna Fail Taoisigh . . .Jack Lynch was the exception . . . have sought to introduce such a scheme. In September 1999, the current Taoiseach wrote to the main opposition party leaders enclosing a discussion paper on a state honours system and expressing his openness to any views which the other parties would like to put forward. However, the idea was dropped after Fine Gael opposed the scheme . . . its front bench decided that "an honours system was foreign to our traditions and essentially was more trouble than it was worth".