EU assembly counts the cost of Irish language

Use of the Irish language in the European parliament will cost €677,000, a cost of over €100,000 a head for fluent Gaelic speaking MEPs, show internal documents.

Irish MEP – and parliament’s only native Gaelic speaker - Seán O Neachtain – welcomes provision that will enable him to speak in his mother tongue.

He is planning to avail himself of new translating facilities when MEPs gather for next year’s first Strasbourg plenary on January 15 2007.

“I am native speaker, Irish was the sole language I spoke until I was 14 and I will be using the service all the time,” he told TheParliament.com.

O Neachtain rejects criticism of the costs for interpretation services likely to only be regularly used by five Irish speaking MEPs.

“Overall the benefit to multilingualism and cultural diversity outweighs the cost,” he argues. “There is a new feel to the Irish language. It is considered a symbol of the people, it is more about identity than communication.”

But Irish translation services are set to be limited after the parliament found a there is a shortage of trained interpreters.

Next year speeches will be translated from the text and off the cuff comments, responses or free flowing debate will not be translated.

“The material constraints imposed by the lack of suitably qualified Irish language interpreters on the market imply that the parliament should make arrangements to provide passive interpretation from the Irish language
during plenary sessions on occasions when this is requested, with sufficient notice, by embers wishing to speak Irish,” notes an internal document.

Gaelic is a minority pursuit even within Ireland’s 3.9 million population with 2002 figures showing only 36 per cent having “an ability” in Irish.

Those speaking Irish on a daily basis are even thinner on the ground, with contested figures showing that 80,000 to 350,000 of Ireland’s citizens use Gaelic as matter of course.

Ireland did not ask for Gaelic to be counted as an official language when joining the EU in 1973.

The issue did not arise in a EU of nine members and fewer languages but came to the fore in 2004 with enlargement and language rights for countries such as Malta with just 397,000 citizens.

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