David Norris (Independent)

I support Senator Mooney's request for a debate on this issue. Exciting possibilities are opening up. I received a letter yesterday from a group called the Decentralisation to Brussels Unit, Cúpla Focal Limited, which indicated it is in possession of a language used only in officially sanctioned documents and now available under licence. Anything published in the language, it stated, will never be read by anybody and confidentiality is thus guaranteed. It continued:

The licence holder will benefit from a Language Support Organisation, with staff employed by the Government of Ireland on a permanent and pensionable basis, and whose numbers have been greatly expanded. This highly professional organisation lays claim to eighty years' experience in the use of government language, without any leakage of the official language into the surrounding community.

Governments can, therefore, be assured of confidentiality. This is clearly from someone with a strong entrepreneurial streak who, like Senator Mooney, believes there will be a use for the Irish language in the future as, I hope, there will be a use for Temple Bar.

I note a report has just been published on the future of Temple Bar. I ask the Leader to arrange a debate on Temple Bar, which is now experiencing the problems some of us prophesied some time ago. I can definitely make that claim because I took a lease in the area in 1978 when we established the Hirschfeld Centre. We were the only group not to receive funding and we were ruthlessly extirpated, while money was poured into pubs and cheap plastic public sculpture. The atmosphere created in the area was described on radio this morning as "Pints, puke and paintings."