Dr. Teresa Lynn:

There are a few areas there. I am not sure if the Deputy is familiar with the European language equality project and the report on the Irish language but I would recommend reading that. It is not too long and answers most of the questions he asked. I will go through a few of the topics. The Deputy said the tech-savvy youth of today will be living in a world where it will be easier to speak in Irish or Spanish and so on through technology. It should be easier but it is not. It only will be if the funding is put up by the Government to build the technology. It is not enough to say we have tech-savvy people coming along who will be more comfortable with it. We have had technology experts in our universities for years. We also had an undergraduate course in DCU 20 years ago, which I did, in computational linguistics but it was done away with in 2004 because there was no need. We do not have Irish computational linguists anymore. We have a couple of people coming through the Trinity course, which is very theory-based. We have two or three people coming through a year who speak Irish and the rest elect French or German as their language. If those two or three are not swept up by Google or Facebook, we might be lucky to get them to work on a research project. We need to fill the skills gap. As I said earlier, it is not a case of having tech people who can code in Python and Prolog and speak a bit of Irish. This is artificial intelligence we are talking about. It is a very specific area in computer science that we need people to be skilled up in. We need them to understand the linguistics of the language and have a good command of the language. When you fill that skills gap, you can expect to have the technology that supports these people in the future in a technical world.

There are some phones, technologies and software that have settings for Irish but it is always very basic and minimal. You can change your phone settings but the phone does not listen to you. It cannot understand people or go off and search the Internet properly for them in Irish. It is all done as a facade. If you go to your favourite search engine, it might be in Irish on the front end but at the back end it is not doing a whole lot of intelligence in terms of Irish.