Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I notice that often the people who are most intolerant of other languages are those who are monolingual English speakers and that Irish speakers tend to be fairly easy going about it because they have faced the problem of not being able to get services through the Irish language and they are very supportive of other cultures. People coming to this country, particularly those with children going to school, tend to be very open to the idea of learning not only English but Irish as well. They often have a very open attitude towards languages. Many of them are not only bilingual but are multilingual when they arrive here.

The influx of people into this country has changed attitudes towards languages which is very welcome and which, in a peculiar way — I have been asked the question recently by a number of commentators — is very supportive of Irish because it has resulted in a much greater acceptance of difference, multiculturalism and multilingualism which was not so evident 20 or 30 years ago when I was growing up. Every time I gave my name, I was asked what it was in English as if one could not have a name in a language without an English equivalent. There is a much greater acceptance now that one's name is one's name and that one does not have to keep translating it into another language.

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