Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I must clarify that I never said or intended to convey the idea that nobody read the Clare county plan or that people were not using it every day. I imagine that if one looked at the number of hits for the county plan on the website one would see it was one of the most used documents, in Irish and English, to be found anywhere. County plans are working documents that are used every day. What I said was that there were few people stupid enough to pay €50 for a document they can get free from the Internet.

We will, I hope, have a detailed and rational debate about this tomorrow. When we were framing the Bill and debating it in the House, we discussed the balance between the right of the citizen to use the first official language in communicating with the State and the cost of producing documents. We tried to take a middle road, that is, that certain basic documents would be seen as a fundamental right of the citizen.

The question of usage is a vexed one when we are talking about rights. We know that habitual Irish speakers are a minority. If we say a document should not be published because many people would not use it, this has mind-boggling implications for a whole set of minority rights. When we are dealing with minorities, the numbers will always be much lower. We must tease out the question of whether minorities - particularly in this case, as the minority is using the first official language of the State - have some rights to basic documents in Irish and, if so, which documents. As the Deputy knows, I am open to debate.

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