Mr. Alan Esslemont:

The present Government and Minister, to be fair, have taken on board the fact that although Irish is the first language of Ireland, it is actually a minority language, and most minority languages basically shift away towards the majority and die. That is of huge importance for Ireland. In the same way that there is science for the pandemic and science for climate action, there is also science for language shift. We can fight against language shift based on strategy and on three pillars. One is corpus management. Corpus management is about having the words, that is, having dictionaries online, being able to go on your phone and type up texts in Irish easily - all of that. That is really important. Corpus management is massively important. Acquisition management is about how you can learn Irish. The best way to learn Irish is at home, so there is a huge emphasis on helping people raise their kids through Irish. Then there is the ability to go to school through Irish, and that is really important. It has been shown in lots of countries that language-medium education is really important. The second bit is learning the language. The third pillar is status management. Being the first language is important, being in law is important and being up on signs is important, but being in the media is probably, in the modern world, the most important thing.

TG4 will come forward this year with plans for a learning hub and new ways for people to help teachers teach Irish, etc. TG4 is key to this going forward, but we need the resources our peers in Europe have. That is the post-Covid plan. It is to get up to that point. Those are key structures and key strategies. In the same way we became aware of how to manage the pandemic and are aware of how we want to manage climate, we need to be aware of how we need to manage the Irish language in Ireland. I believe that TG4 is key to that.

If I may come in on intellectual property, we have been working with RTÉ and lots of other bodies. It is really important that, whatever we do in investment, Irish intellectual property grows. We are therefore working not just with a group of producers but also with the various crafts in audiovisual to try to push that forward. Ms Finnegan knows a lot more than me about this.