The potential of an increased status for the Irish language emerged at a recent symposium held in Brussels entitled "The less-spoken languages of the EU". The elevation of Irish can be found in a new sub-paragraph to Article 8d of the draft Treaty of the European Community (TEC) as agreed at Amsterdam. This states: "Every citizen of the Union may write to any of the institutions or bodies. . . in one of the languages mentioned in Article 248 and have an answer in the same language." Article 248 refers to the 12 languages of the treaties, one of which is Irish.
In the past, Irish-speakers have had access in their native language only to the Treaty, receiving all other texts in English - one of the 11 Community languages. It was during the accession negotiations with Denmark and Britain in the early 1970s that Irish was recognised as a "Treaty" language, but not a Community language. Assuming the Amsterdam Treaty is ratified, citizens of Ireland will be allowed to write and receive all information from all EU institutions in Irish.
The funding required to provide a proper translation and interpretation infrastructure was seen by symposium delegates as "a necessary price for democracy", to serve the Irish community, as well as other minority languages, such as Luxembourgish and Catalan. The constant need to keep budgets under control is the main restraint on the use of lesser-spoken languages.
In the interests of economy, proposals for a reduced number of working languages are regularly made. Others respond that if English, French and Spanish, for example, were to become the official working languages of the EU, it would be necessary for political leaders or candidates to have mastery of these languages. This would limit the number of potential candidates and could create a sense of alienation and voter apathy.
To combat these trends and the loss of languages, the EU has to recognise and accept the necessary expenditures in translation and interpretation services, thus ensuring all EU citizens' rights to write and receive any and all information from any EU institution in their own language. Leaving this responsibility to individual countries, may mean they fail to translate all materials.
But the multi-lingual reality of the Union comes with a big price tag. In 1995, one third of the entire administrative budget of the EU was spent on translation and interpretation, and this is likely only to increase.
The new Irish-language facilities are subject to ratification of the Treaty of Amsterdam, available for review in all of the 12 Treaty languages. This point was made very clear to Niall Andrews (Dublin, UFE) when he asked the Commission in July to confirm Irish citizens' rights to write to the Commission and all other institutions in Irish and get a response in Irish. He was told that it was "premature to comment before ratification".
Other MEPs from the Union for Europe group are concerned about proposals in next year's draft budget to reduce by 10 per cent funding for the EU's lesser-used languages programme, to ECU 3.2 million.
About 51 million Europeans speak more than 40 languages described as minority, regional or lesser-used. They include Breton, Corsican, Catalan, Alsatian and Occitan in France; Lappish in Finland and Sweden; Irish, Welsh and Scots Gaelic; and non-territorial languages, such as the Yiddish and gypsy languages.
Pat "the Cope" Gallagher (Connacht/Ulster, UFE) commented: "We will be doing our utmost to ensure the proposed cutback is reversed when the budget comes before Parliament later in the year."