Dr. Pádraig Ó Tiarnaigh:

Sílim go raibh Conchúr Ó Muadaigh ag iarraidh an cheist sin ach níl a fhuaim ag obair. I think Mr. Ó Muadaigh is looking to answer that question but I do not think his sound is coming through. To pick up on what Mr. Finucane said, of course, the An Dream Dearg campaign and the campaign for an Irish language Act were among the real high points of social organising in the North since 2016. When we look at the demographics of those campaigns, we can see that this really was a grassroots community-led revival that tried to drive its own issue to the heart of the political discourse. It succeeded after being pushed to the margins for so long and having been disenfranchised by this roundabout, where we have an agreement followed by a lack of implementation and then another agreement followed by a lack of implementation, and by going round the houses and having public consultation after public consultation, draft Bill after draft Bill and proposals blocked and blocked again. This really was a road to nowhere until the An Dream Dearg campaign took it by the scruff of the neck. Everything seemed to change in 2017 when we succeeded in having a majority - a very historic majority - in the new assembly for the first time for Irish language rights. Obviously, given the cross-community nature of the assembly, we were unable to get that through.

In terms of the impact of this legislation on communities and the strategy, this is about young people being afforded the same rights as their Celtic counterparts in Wales, Scotland or indeed in the South. We are the only jurisdiction anywhere in these islands that does not afford legislative protection for our native language. This is outrageous in 2021, 23 years after the Good Friday Agreement that was supposed to herald a new era of equality. It is hugely disappointing and frustrating for the generations of schoolchildren who are coming through Irish medium schools, many of which are inadequate and in accommodation that is not good enough. Much of the progress mentioned by Mr. Finucane happened in spite of the state and in spite of legislation. Communities have had to do that themselves. They have had to shake buckets, collect money and build schools. This has not been done without a struggle and those communities need to be applauded and commended for the work they have done to keep the Irish language going in their own communities and schools. This legislation is supposed to protect them first and foremost. It is supposed to take their language, schools and community centres out of the hands of political attacks, insulate them legally and give them a framework through which we can avail of services from the state. It is mediocre legislation. It is a starting point. We want to strengthen it. We want to be in a place five or ten years down the line where the same rights are afforded to us as to Welsh-speaking children in Wales. We are not there yet - we are not even close - but it is an historic moment. The most pressing point is getting this over the line so we can let the language commissioner come in, get this moving and working, see how it works and point out how fragile it may be in certain places.

One of the main problems we foresee is that rather than removing the language from that sort of vexed confrontational party political environment in which the language sometimes get bogged down, it re-embeds it because it re-embeds the legislation into the office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister, which is essentially a political veto over some of the works of the language commissioner. We are very keen to get this up and running. We are very keen to let those children see the impact of the changes they fought to bring about. Hopefully, that can happen as soon as possible because people are getting hugely frustrated. As I said, we are going down the road of a complete crisis of confidence in agreements so this could just be another agreement that is never implemented and we will be back here in five years arguing about the same thing.