Minister for Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív has rejected Opposition claims that the Irish language could be dead in 100 years. He also staunchly defended the decision to make it mandatory to translate official documents into Irish.
"A lot of documents - 90 per cent - are in English only and are not read and nobody complains about the costs of printing and editing. There are 600 documents a year that have to be translated into Irish and suddenly it becomes a big problem," he said.
The Minister was ending a debate over two days on the Irish language, which was conducted mainly in Irish and which culminated in a row between Mr Ó Cuív and Labour TD Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire), who strongly criticised the Government's approach to Irish.
Mr Gilmore also derided the decision to decentralise Foras na Gaeilge from Dublin to Gweedore, Co Donegal, and said that some of the Irish language fraternity seemed to think that everything to do with Irish should be on the western seaboard. The language belonged to the entire nation and not just the west.
Mr Ó Cuív rejected the criticism and said there was no reason for Foras not to decentralise. He did not understand the mentality "that everything has to be in Dublin".
The Minister said less than 1 per cent of Oireachtas business was conducted in Irish and criticised those who felt that if someone spoke in Irish the language was "being pushed on them".
In other EU parliaments the issue was not treated like this. "The usual thing is that people will speak English if an English-only speaker is in their company."
Earlier Mr Gilmore said there was a danger for the future of the Irish language because of increasing pressure on it. The Language Commission report published last week said many minority and regional languages were under pressure and 90 per cent of them would be dead in 100 years. "Irish could be one of them," said Mr Gilmore.
"The language is in danger despite the investment by the State which has failed in its efforts through the education system. Some €500 million is spent a year on Irish, and pupils get 1,500 hours of tuition in Irish but when they finish school they are not fluent."
Mr Ó Cuív dismissed this. An analysis carried out in 1955 on the Gaeltacht showed there were 55,000 native speakers and that figure had hardly changed since then.
