Written answers
Tuesday, 18 February 2025
Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht
Artificial Intelligence
Aidan Farrelly (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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405. To ask the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht if her Department has taken advice in respect of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) within her Department in 2024, 2024 and to date in 2025; if any section of her Department currently makes use of artificial intelligence; if she will outline the purposes it is utilised for and costs associated with same; if she has consulted with any consultancy firms in respect of the use of AI; if she will provide a schedule of consultants engaged and costs of same; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [6347/25]
Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael)
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My Department is guided by relevant legislation, policies and the National Cyber Security Centre in respect of all matters related to the use or operation of AI. All applications and platforms used or operated by my Department must be in line with relevant policies and be consistent with advice provided by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
I am advised by my officials that no programs or Departmental operations are conducted using artificial intelligence tools.
For information, my Department has funded a number of programmes relating to artificial intelligence and the Irish language, as set out in the table below.
| Nature of AI systems or research funded | Amount Spent in 2024 on AI systems or research | Amount allocated for 2025 on AI systems or research | Further detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| ALT-EDIC (Large Language Model for European Languages (Gaeilge)) | €45,000 | €45,000 | ALT-EDIC is a European Digital Infrastructure Consortium founded in February 2024, with Ireland as a founding member. Its key objectives are to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe, promote technological excellence and leadership, and tackle challenges relating to Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Abair.ie (Speech-to-text / Text-to-speech as Gaeilge) | €326,776 | €427,691 | The Abair project aims to develop state-of-the-art language technologies for Irish, with a particular emphasis on speech synthesis and voice recognition applications. |
| eStór (Large Language Model for Gaeilge) | €391,850 | €249,098 | eStór is a data collection project aimed at enhancing the operability of Irish for the European Commission’s eTranslation machine translation platform, which is based on neural machine translation. |
| An Gaodhal (Optical Character Recognition software for Old Irish script) | N/A | €40,000 | The An Gaodhal project aims to develop character recognition software for Irish, with a particular emphasis on character recognition for texts written in the old Gaelic typeface. |
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