Mr. Tom?s Kenny:

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gcoiste as ucht an chuiridh seo. Tá brón orm go mbeidh mé ag caint i mBéarla because this is something I am very passionate about and I would not be able to get my point across as eloquently in Irish. I have been selling books in Kenny's for 21 years. There are effectively three parts to the puzzle. There is the publishing of the book, its distribution and marketing and its sale. I will talk a little bit about each of the three.

There is very good State funding for publishers and there is an awful lot of books published in Irish. It is almost comparable to the number of books published in English on the island, which is remarkable given the relative size of the two readerships. However, there are issues with what is published. To echo what everyone has said thus far, that fact that some publishers do not use ISBNs is a nightmare because this does not allow books to be inputted into book databases and the point of sale systems that nearly every bookshop in the world uses.

It just makes it awkward and more difficult for anyone to stock. The books are generally more expensive than their English counterparts of the same size. As Liam Donnelly has said, the design, the quality of the paper and the number of illustrations are to a lower standard than one would find in comparable English-language publications. I suspect the reason for that is it is an awful lot cheaper to publish the way it is being published, because, in all too many cases, the publishers do not think they have a saleable product and do not particularly care about selling it. It is more about getting the item published than it is anything beyond that.

Distribution is a very big issue. ÁIS's IT system is extremely poor. It has a wonderful staff who do what they can. It has moved very recently and has a better-functioning warehouse. I would say it has moved from one old software system to a new software system and all of its data is corrupted. The reason it does not have a searchable database - it has sent me a list of every book it has in stock – is it does not know what it has in stock. For example, in the “Title” column, it has authors, ISBNs or data publication, which is a nightmare. You cannot look through it.

For us, and for others, we want a scenario such as the Easons or Amazon websites where they have the books for sale. It cannot be for sale if there is no database to work from. There are approximately 6,000 books in ÁIS at present. We have approximately 1,800 of those on the site, because that is all we could extract from the data that it sent us, which is shockingly poor, but it is not a particularly difficult problem to solve. We deal with millions of books, had this issue and solved it in months. I do not see any reason it could not be improved with a bit more help for ÁIS.

With regard to sale of the book, Futa Fata is the only Irish-language publisher in the country which operates outside of this ÁIS system and it has a sales representative which is not directly linked with ÁIS. I get information about everything that Futa Fata publishes. We stock virtually everything that it publishes. Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin comes into me to tell me what Futa Fata is publishing. With the exception of Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin, in 21 years I have not once had a publisher come in to me to tell me what it has for sale, what it can sell, how it can do it, that it could bring in an author etc. There is not one day goes by that I do not have an English-language publisher come into us with regard to what it can do, how it can do it or to ask how it can improve. There is a complete and utter lack of interest or effort from Irish-language publishers to get their books to a readership. We have been lead to believe in our conversations that, effectively, they see us as a threat to a direct sale through them. If we are based in Galway and they are based 20 miles away and we sell a book in our shop, they consider it a sale that could have gone to them.

In a similar sense, the discounts that Irish-language publishers offer, which are standard and have not changed in 30 or 40 years, are a little over half of what we would get from English-language publishers. The bookshops that the committee has here today are all ideologically driven towards having Irish-language books, but if a bookshop is not so driven or is in a county that might not be traditionally considered a hotbed of Gaeltacht activity, there is no reason for it to stock these books. They cost more, sell less and the shop gets less margin on each book sold. There is no incentive whatsoever.

At the moment, all of the incentive is driven towards the publishers to publish the books. I have no issue with that. It is as it should be. There is some effort going towards helping ÁIS, but not enough. It is effectively operating a 1970s or 1980s model in a digital world. There are absolutely no resources whatsoever towards bookshops to bring in authors or to have events. I suspect that the lack comes both from the State and the publishers themselves.

In the past three years, we have sold Irish-language books to 29 different countries and to every single county on the island. There is an untapped market for these books that is untapped, but the current system puts obstacles to selling them in our way, instead of solutions. If I can in any way facilitate a change in this or a solution, I am happy to offer any help I can.