Tom Sheahan (Kerry South, Fine Gael)
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Question 13: To ask the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs if he will provide an update on the progress on his Department's work in relation to placenames; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [14147/10]

Pat Carey (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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The Placenames Branch of my Department undertakes research, with the support and guidance of An Coimisiún Logainmneacha, in order to establish the correct Irish language forms of the placenames of Ireland and to publish them for official and public use.

The Department is engaged in a comprehensive research programme to provide Irish versions for all placenames in the State on a county basis. Seven counties have been completed and published under this programme to date, namely, counties Kilkenny, Limerick, Louth, Monaghan, Offaly, Tipperary and Waterford. Work is complete in counties Dublin, Galway, Cork, Wexford and Leitrim, while research is at an advanced stage in a number of other counties, namely, Sligo, Clare, Longford and Kerry.

The recent work of the Branch also includes providing Irish language versions of the administrative placenames in the Gaeltacht Areas of Cork, Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Mayo, Meath and Waterford and it has just completed work on some 6,200 non-administrative names in these areas shown on the Ordnance Survey's historical large-scale maps.

A signal achievement of the Placenames Brach in recent years has been the launch in late 2008, in collaboration with Fiontar DCU, of the Placenames Database of Ireland at www.logainm.ie. This free online searchable database has information on over 100,000 official placenames and has proved very popular with the public, with an average of 130,000 hits recorded each month.