Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 16 December 2020

Joint Committee on Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht

Challenges facing Public Broadcasting and the broader Media Sector as a result of Covid-19: Discussion

Mr. Alan Esslemont:

I came to this country in 1984, and the image of the Irish language then was that it was over and done with and dead. That has now totally changed, and image-wise that change is very much down to TG4. It has driven a national side to this endeavour. My daughter teaches in Dublin and she has told me there are about 30 nationalities in her primary school. It is a new Ireland speaking Irish and that is wonderful.

The biggest problem in front of us, however, is for those who speak Irish naturally to value the language enough for them to feel their language is worth as much as the English language in Ireland. That is a huge step and there is a great deal of work which we must do. We are doing well with those learning the language, and we have done well with the image this year. We managed to bring forward our strategy on education and we are now broadcasting "Cúla4 ar Scoil", which has been a great success. There are more than 200,000 people who speak Irish at home. To grow rather than lose that pot will require us to create high-quality content for young people and that includes drama and light entertainment in Irish. We struggle with our current budget, which is limited in that regard, and we have only managed to do the kinds of things I have mentioned when we have gone to the BAI and other sources and secured extra funding.

Unless the scale of TG4 is changed in the next ten years, we will be looking at Irish as a language which exists, has a status of some kind and is used as a kind of network language by some people. If we lose the community language, however, that will be Ireland's biggest ever marker of diversity gone by the wayside. In the context of Ireland's ecosystem, the Irish language is up with its natural heritage resources and needs to be preserved.

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