Mr. Tom?s Kenny:

Liam Donnelly has very ably described the Irish textbook market there. From an Irish-language point of view, as well as a problem with education textbooks, regular fiction books on the curriculum are quite often not in print. When I was doing my leaving certificate, we did Scothscéaltaby Pádraic Ó Conaire. There was a Pádraic Ó Conaire statue on Eyre Square, there still is kind of, and busloads of American tourists used to come in to say that their grandfather had read Pádraic Ó Conaire and to ask to buy it. I would say that all of my classmates wanted to buy it and cannot find it. I remember that ÁIS rang me. I used to ring ÁIS, because I did not know who had published it originally to ask if someone could reprint it, that we could sell loads. Approximately two or three years later, I got a phone call to say it had found two pallettes of Scothscéalta down the back that nobody had realised were there. It is funny in a way, but it also goes back to what we are dealing with. It is the case across the board. Most of the top 20, 40 or 50 books in Irish, in the history of the Irish language, are not in print. If one wants to come into buy a classic, it is difficult. I am straying from the Cathaoirleach's question.

We do not deal with the e-book market. I have no idea what the costs are. There is obviously a cost involved with transferring it. We sell CDs. We obviously have nothing to do with Audible, or whatever, which is how most people would access audiobooks. However, there is a market because much Irish-language reading that we encounter is aspirational in many respects. Many people read aspirational audiobooks on long commutes, such as that difficult science book I will never read. I imagine the same applies to Irish, but that is only a personal opinion.

In terms of stock on shelves, we have many leabhair Ghaeilge. We have second-hand, rare and new books. We have multiple copies of 80% to 90% of the books that were ever published. I was saying to Gráinne Ní Mhuilneoir before we began, that we had Conradh na Gaeilge pamphlets from 1899, 1900 and 1901 that my grandad bought when Conradh na Gaeilge moved its shop on O'Connell Street in the 1970s. We still have them 55 years later, but he probably thought it was a fantastic deal. We would never get rid of or return them or return them because it as an ideological point. It is also a point of difference, to be perfectly honest, from a commercial point of view. There is no point in pretending otherwise. There are very few people who sell books in Irish. It is good to do so because it brings people in the door. There is a market there, even if people are not always aware of it.