Canadian prime minister Paul Martin is to join President Mary McAleese at a ceremony in west Cork later this month to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Air India disaster in which 329 people died.
Mr Martin is expected to arrive in Cork on June 22nd and attend the ceremony at Ahakista near Bantry, west Cork, the following day.
The victims of the terrorist bomb attack will be remembered at the event.
Officials from the Canadian embassy and Canadian security personnel have been liaising with Cork County Council, which is hosting the ceremony.
Air India Flight 182 was travelling from Montreal to New Delhi and was just 30 minutes from a scheduled stopover at Heathrow when it disappeared off the radar screen of air traffic control at Shannon at 8.13am on June 23rd, 1985, off the Irish coast.
It later emerged that a bomb had been detonated on board and in the days that followed 133 bodies of passengers and crew were recovered in a major operation involving the Irish Navy, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the RAF.
The news of Mr Martin's plans to attend the ceremony follows criticism in Canada of his minority Liberal government over its reluctance to establish a public inquiry into the deadliest terrorist attack in Canadian history.
Families of the 329 people who died had urged the Canadian government to hold a new investigation into the atrocity after the two men accused in the case were acquitted by a British Columbia court in March due to lack of credible evidence.
Two Sikhs, millionaire Vancouver businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik (58) and mill worker Ajaib Singh Bagri (55) were acquitted of first-degree murder after a judge ruled some prosecution witnesses weren't credible.
Most of those killed in the Air India atrocity were Canadians of Indian descent, believed murdered by Sikh extremists in retaliation for the Indian army's raid a year earlier on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism's holiest shrine.
In April, the Canadian parliament passed an opposition motion for a public inquiry by 172 votes to 124 following a bitter exchange during which opposition leader Stephen Harper asked if an inquiry would come sooner if more of the victims had been white.
The government insisted the motion was non-binding and Mr Martin reacted angrily to the charge, saying "any notions of racism are odious and any accusations of such are simply not acceptable".
Mr Martin pointed out that deputy prime minister Anne McLellan was working with the families of the Air India victims on the appropriate course of action.
"She is seeking the questions that the families want to have answered," he said.
Last month the Canadian government announced it was setting up a special fund of just over €1 million to enable two members of each family of those killed in the attack to come to Ireland for the remembrance ceremony.