Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The statement in the article in the newspaper is nonsense. It talks about 90,000 people in the Gaeltacht. I think there are 86,000 people. It goes on to talk about the number of Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht. As we all know, a large number of daily Irish speakers do not live in the Gaeltacht. The Irish language is the possession of the people of Ireland and not the people of the Gaeltacht. The Gaeltacht's relevance in all this is that it is the area in which the Irish language is still a community language.

If one checks the statistics, there are more daily Irish speakers than daily Cantonese or Mandarin speakers. The only figures on which we can go are the census figures, which are authoritative. When one checks them for daily Irish speakers, and even allowing for the fact children say they speak Irish daily, one finds the article is another one of those in that particular newspaper which is short on fact and quite liberal in the way it interprets things, but good luck to it. I suppose it sells newspapers.

The other issue is much broader. I know of no proposal to amend the Constitution to add other official languages. The Irish language was the indigenous language of the country going back 2,000 years and the one which survived. Norman French and English followed. English is now recognised as an official language in view of the fact a large number of people on this island speak it. I presume sometime in the future if there are sufficient numbers of speakers of other languages, the Oireachtas and the people — the only two groups which can do so — might seek to change the official languages of this State, but I do not believe it is an issue at present.

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