Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, United Left) | Oireachtas source

I wanted to speak in this debate because I believe it is an important one that comes up once a year. I am not a fluent Irish speaker; I am not even an Irish speaker. Deputies Aengus Ó Snodaigh and Maureen O'Sullivan raised many interesting points about where the Irish language is going. To my mind, unless a language is a living language, and unless it is nearly the primary language in a country, it is very hard to hold on to that language as a cultural and traditional language. I fully commend people who speak fluent Irish, those who teach it, those who love it and those who live their daily lives through the language. However, the reality is it is not the primary language of Ireland. There is a population of 4.5 million, yet the aim is to increase the number who speak Irish daily outside the education system from 83,000 to 250,000 in 20 years. I cannot see the practicality of that in the way we are implementing this at the moment.

An issue raised by Deputy Ó Snodaigh is how we make it become part of the workplace, part of the Civil Service, part of the education system and part of family life and general life so that we need to learn it. I would love to be able to speak French as I visit France quite regularly. However, the only way for a person to learn it is to force themselves to speak and actually engage in it. Other than that, a person is not going to learn it. There has to be a recognition of this by the Government and future Governments.

We must ask whether there is a basis for putting huge resources into the language. Is it the case that economic issues will become predominant and it will not be needed? For example, the multinationals and the Civil Service might not see the need for Irish in the workplace. When I came through education, we got the blackboard with Máire and the madra, and so on. I am not sure whether it has come on much from there, although there is probably more engagement in the classroom now. However, we would need to have a real injection of the type of radical measures Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan spoke about, such as schooling being through Irish for the first three years and Irish being spoken in crèches. That would mean huge investment and mean that teachers and crèche workers would all have to be able to speak fluent Irish. I do not know that the Government is willing to put that type of money into this.

There is a huge question around the language. If the position stays as it is, it will not be any sort of a living language, even in some of the Gaeltacht areas. This is because these areas will be highly influenced by the economic influences from elsewhere, as well as by the practical point that people have to converse in English in industry, economics, trade and so on.

In my remaining time, I want to focus on the subject of Irish Sign Language, ISL, which has not had much mention in the debate. We know the Irish Sign Language Bill was debated in the Seanad in 2013 but it did not go through. This involves a small cohort of people, with 5,000 deaf people and up to 40,000 others using it daily. The situation to date is that no deaf child can fully learn Irish Sign Language as not all teachers are fluent or qualified in it. I raise this issue because, if we are not going to deal with Irish as a language, we are certainly not going to be able to deal with Irish Sign Language. The programme for Government stated: "We will examine different mechanisms to promote the recognition of Irish Sign Language." In the National Disability Strategy Implementation Plan 2013-15, there are only two references to sign language and only four references to deafness.

The question is what the Government is doing about Irish Sign Language. If it will not do anything for the Irish language, what will it do in a practical way to get Irish Sign Language onto the agenda again? Will it bring in a Bill to recognise Irish Sign Language? Will it introduce the structures that are needed in the schools, such as teachers and other supports that are needed for people to converse in Irish Sign Language?

This involves a group of people who are very cut off. The practical chances of them getting jobs within the community are insignificant when compared with the chances of others. Are we going to leave this group aside and say we are putting nothing into this? Only 8% of those who use Irish Sign Language are fully conversant in it. How are we going to address this? I have not heard anything to date that will even go near to dealing with this. I would like an answer in this regard.

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