This is the scheme set up by the government in the wake of the finding that it was wrong, all these years, to take the pensions from old people in part-payment for their stay in certain long-stay homes . . . a finding, by the way, which in my opinion should have been ignored. Nobody much minded the pension books being taken in return for long-term residential care, as long as a few quid was given back for cigarettes and sweets and so on, and giving in their pension book offered old people, who had little or no other means, some sense of paying their own way.

Families are rich sources of savage behaviour at the best of times. The forms claiming the health repayment, I'm told, are flying out the doors of the post offices.

Supply can't keep up with demand. And of course, many of these will become perfectly legitimate claims, made by the people themselves who have been wrongfully charged or by someone nominated by them either now, in life, or in a will.

But more or less anything to do with family money can start the most bitter rows, and anyone who feels that person X only got to be dead person Y's executor through nothing but ratlike cunning will be none too pleased to see X now raking in the repayment money because they are the executor.

The real dramas will come where the dead person did not leave anything like a will, and there is no executor . . . which I'm sure will very often be the case, because old people on medical cards who stayed in publicly-funded long-stay facilities obviously didn't own much of anything. This repayment may well be the first lump of money ever associated with them.

Anyway (as I understand it from reading the forms), where there's no will, someone from the next of kin has to put themselves forward as a person entitled to receive the repayment on behalf of the deceased person's estate. To take an example rich in dramatic possibilities . . . if the deceased person died a bachelor, his parents are the nearest next-of-kin, unless he had non-marital children, in which case any one, two or more of them has priority to apply. Oh wow, is all I can say about that scenario.

Another category is a deceased person who died a spinster/bachelor without nonmarital children or parent or brother or sister; in this case a nephew or niece is entitled to apply. That's going to be a really hard one . . . in a large Irish family there could be loads of nieces and nephews who might be on any terms, from hardly knowing each other to hating one another's guts. How does the scheme decide which niece or nephew is the one entitled to claim the grant? I rang the helpline, and a pleasant young man told me cheerfully, "First come, first served". That's not going to do a hell of a lot for tense family gatherings, I must say.

But before you rush out to get the forms, let me tell you there's a further twist to all this. Let's suppose that you have received the repayment on behalf of the deceased person's estate, and you've paid any outstanding debts the person left. What have you to do with the rest of the money?

Book your Caribbean holiday? Well, no.

You're supposed to distribute the remainder to all the next of kin she/he had at the date of his/her death. And . . . and this is the killer, this is where the civil service mentality loses contact altogether with real life . . . you have to ensure that any person to whom you make a payment is aware of their obligations under the Capital Acquisitions Tax code and satisfy yourself that these obligations have been dealt with before making any payment. In other words, you have to call around to all your cousins and tell them they're not getting anything until you check out their tax returns.

Many people would ask themselves at this point whether the hassle will be worth the money. But how much money might be involved? I don't know whether the whole pension for years and years is going to be repaid or whether something will be kept back as a contribution to care received, and the helpline won't talk about sums of money at all. I know there's one thing you can do if you're the person who applied for and received the repayment . . . you can donate part of it to a fund to improve the care of dependant older persons. Which brings up an interesting question.

Which do you think would infuriate the rest of the extended family more and get you into more trouble . . . asking to see their tax returns, or informing them that you've given their money back to the government?