Brian O'Shea (Waterford, Labour)

I guarantee the Minister that if he went out in the street and asked the first 20 people he met what they know about the 20 year draft strategy very few of them would know about it and fewer again would know anything contained in it. I accept that the Gaeltacht people were consulted, and rightly so, as well as the Irish language organisations but there is a broader public that we are not reaching, and that is my major concern. There is a great deal of soft support for the Irish language. It is about converting that into real support and people doing something. That is where I see the major flaw. The leadership must come from this House and we should engage in an exercise where we would have a full debate, with full ministerial participation of Departments that are providing services for the Irish language. It is vitally important also to get people to engage with the language and use whatever Irish they have in a bilingual sense and so on. We are not reaching the people, and the situation is getting worse.

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