Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is welcome. I was not due to speak on this Bill today but I decided to do so in order to highlight that a large number of people do not speak their native tongue. I am ashamed to say that I am one of them. I would not have understood many of the statements made earlier in the debate. That is a failing on my behalf, but there is a significant number of people who do not have an understanding of our national tongue. There is an issue there. It needs more of a conversation. It would be important to have statements on the Irish language. It is something I might bring up.

I remember the book Peig, which has been mentioned by other speakers. I could not stand it, to be honest, because I found it so difficult to grasp. I can speak German better than I can speak my own native language because of the way I feel it is taught in the secondary schools in particular. There needs to be more of an emphasis on learning the actual language and speaking it than on the poetry and the prose at a younger age. Maybe that aspect of the language should be confined to higher leaving certificate level. There is an issue because too many people do not speak Irish. If one did an audit of all the students in the country, one would probably find that the level of speaking of our European languages is higher than our native tongue. It is an issue that needs to be addressed. I need to address it and learn my own national language. It is important I recognise that I am not able to speak it. Something needs to be done about it. I was christened Michael but I have always used Micheál and used the síneadh fada. I remember almost getting deported from America because of the different spelling of the name from what was on my paperwork.

There is an issue with the number of Gaelscoils, their availability and the facilities to allow more families to send children to them. In my county of Longford, which has a population of 40,000, we have just one Gaelscoil. It is in a prefabricated building on the site of Longford Slashers GAA Club because a site was not available to build a school at the time. That is probably going back 15 years. We are now in 2021 and we still do not have a site for that school. I have raised the issue with the Department of Education. I ask the Minister of State to bring that issue to the Department to make sure a permanent site is identified for the school. It should not be in a two-storey prefabricated building on temporary grounds at the side of a GAA pitch. That needs to be highlighted.

We need a general discussion about the promotion of the Irish language and the way we teach it. That is just an opinion of my own.

As Senator Dolan mentioned, Conradh na Gaeilge has proposed a number of amendments. I will mention a few of them. On page 14, it seeks to add a deadline for logos in English of existing State bodies - Transport Infrastructure Ireland, for example - to be changed to bilingual logos. On the same page, it proposes that public bodies should have their new logos in Irish only to further encourage the language. On page 16, another Conradh na Gaeilge proposal seeks to ensure 5% of the advertising budgets of public bodies are spent on advertising in Irish-language media. This would support TG4 and Raidió na Gaeltachta etc. Furthermore, Conradh na Gaeilge proposes the inclusion in the Bill of a deadline by which services provided by all public bodies should be provided in Gaeltacht language planning areas in Irish.

The more we do and the more services we roll out in Irish, the more benefit it will have for oral Irish. However, I strongly believe we need to change it in our schools.It needs to be taught at that younger level and maybe up to junior certificate in the way other European languages are. Students should learn to speak the language, rather then concentrating on prose and so on.