Cabinet Irish language group to meet

THE CABINET sub-committee established five months ago to consider Irish language usage in the Gaeltacht will meet next week for the first time.

But the Minister of State for Gaeltacht Affairs, Pat Carey, rejected Labour Party claims that the establishment of the committee was "tokenism". The committee will deal with the recommendations of a linguistic study, which analysed the use of Irish in the Gaeltacht and will review boundaries in Údarás na Gaeltachta electoral areas.

Labour's Gaeltacht affairs spokesman, Brian O'Shea, questioned whether deputies could "anticipate the application of greater urgency in respect of the scrutiny by the Cabinet committee of the analysis and recommendations in the report. This is typical of how matters are handled in the department, in that it goes on and on, decisions are not made and a deteriorating situation becomes worse." He did not believe there would be boundary changes before the next Údarás elections, and he was concerned the recommendations in the report would not be implemented before the election of the next government.

"There is a great deal of technical and legislative work to be done. There is absolutely no urgency about this. The setting up of this Cabinet-level committee is really an example of tokenism." Mr Carey said: "I completely reject the assertion that this is tokenism" and that the Minister for Gaeltacht Affairs "is not involved in token gestures".

One of the recommendations "is that certain electoral districts be redrawn with a view to combining townlands and so on, including existing Irish-speaking networks, with adjacent electoral divisions of the same linguistic profile. Obviously, this has a knock-on effect on other legislation."