Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There were families in a cluster of houses in Mr. Ó Beaglaoich's area. Some 120 people lived in the area and there are something like 30 living there now. They cannot get planning permission to demolish the old fothracha, the old ruins of buildings where families lived in the past, and replace them with houses. That is bizarre in this day and age in places where people are willing to live where there are some types of services. Traditional family grouping, or extended family grouping, was what sustained the Irish language for many years. There are different traditional settlements and there needs to be a recognition that they need to continue for the Irish language to survive. Not all the housing has to be put into a town or large village because that is not necessarily always best for the Irish language in those areas. If you build a housing estate with 100 houses and 30% or 60% is left to one side for Irish-language speakers, or whatever the guidelines will say, there is always a danger that the vernacular, the day-to-day language in the area, will be changed by virtue of a larger family grouping or groupings coming into that proportion of the housing.

A lot of work has been done on this. As the Minister said, he met representatives of Conradh na Gaeilge, who have done a lot of work. He is also going to meet representatives of Bánú, which means "clearance". That is the frustration. Anybody who visits the Gaeltacht in late September or October, or in any of the months until Easter, will see when they go down the road at 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. that all the houses that are occupied by locals are the ones with the lights on. Deputy O'Callaghan read out some of the stuff in the report on Tuairisc.ie about the amount of holiday homes in those areas. Nobody wants to take all those holiday homes away from the people who own them at this stage, but there has to be some approach to ensure that those who want to live in an area can do so and are not squeezed out. All of these amendments are intended to try to help them and to give recognition to other policies of the Government that are aimed at enhancing and protecting the language. That is why we have service towns, language networks, Gaeltacht planning and language planning. Until now, there has been recognition of these matters in the Irish-language legislation, Acht na Gaeltachta and Acht na dTeangacha Oifigiúla. This is an opportunity to make sure they have a status and that there is recognition of the effect of those plans in our planning legislation so that they are given full effect and are not an afterthought. That is often the frustration for Irish-language speakers and Gaeltacht residents. They are often an afterthought and resources are spent in the big city or town in an area and are not spent in an area that hosts them as residents and is also supposed to host the half of the country who want to live there in the summer months. The services are put in place to welcome and serve the visitors but not to serve the needs of the local community.

I will leave it at that. Perhaps we could get an idea of how the groupings work. As Deputy Cian O'Callaghan said, there are approximately six different underlying themes here and I do not want to be jumping back and forth if I can avoid it.