Immigrants have changed attitudes in Ireland to languages and "in a peculiar way" this has been very supportive of Irish, according to the Minister for Gaeltacht Affairs, Mr Ó Cuív.
He told the Dáil immigration had "resulted in a much greater acceptance of difference, of multiculturalism and multilingualism".
He added: "People coming to this country, particularly those with children going to school, tend to be very open to the idea of learning not only English but Irish as well . . . Many of them are not only bilingual but multilingual when they arrive here."
Mr Ó Cuív also rejected as "nonsense" a recent newspaper report that more people in Ireland now spoke Mandarin or Cantonese than Irish.
Labour's Gaeltacht affairs spokesman, Mr Brian O'Shea, who raised the issue, said that Ireland was becoming a multicultural society and "in future languages such as the Chinese ones will be the first language to a greater number than those using the Irish language."
The article reported that about 50,000 people spoke a Chinese language in Ireland and that only half of the 90,000 people in the Gaeltacht spoke Irish regularly. "Large resources were spent in developing the Irish language, yet this comparison emerges," he said.
This "must make us reflect on how successful the movement for the revival of the Irish language has been over the history of the State and how much our society is changing."
The Minister said, however, there were 86,000 people in the Gaeltacht and "a large number of daily Irish speakers in this country do not live in the Gaeltacht. The Irish language is the possession of the people of Ireland and not the people of the Gaeltacht."
