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A very Important issue

Blackjack · 2003-12-16 00:05:06

A very important issue for me and others, anyway. As a Native speaker, I am astounded that the present Government has allowed the situation to arise where in a Modern EU that Irish will not be recognised as an official Language. Personally, I find this an insult to myself and to many others that my first language does not…

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#32 17-12-2003 2:13am
De Rebel

Registered Users Posts: 1,109 ✭✭✭

Join Date: September 2002

Posts: 1049

Looks like this is going to run and run

Repeating my post from a previous thread....

In practice, in terms of working languages, the Brussels simultaneous translation service will often drop to 3 or 4 languages for routine meetings. The official paperwork will appear in all of the official languages, but frequently the English and French versions appear ahead of the others and are often the only ones available for meetings.

The points made by Sceptre and Vinnyfitz are well made. We have “struggled by” for 31 years in the EEC/EEU/EU without Irish ever having designation as an official or a working language, and it has never prevented us from being successful in the primary objective we set ourselves when joining the EEC (Screwing every last penny we could out of the Germans)

If the will of the majority is to live with the ambiguity that is Article 8 of the Constitution of Ireland then so be it. (and it has to be said that the lofty ideal of the first section of that article is brought crashing to the ground by the pragmatic if not cynical third section – so typical of De Valera and so revealing of the fact that he had no intention of restoring the Irish language to primacy). I'd rather we look to the century ahead and leave the language behind along with the other vestiges of the 19th/20th century (Draining the Shannon, the "Sinn Fein" philosophy ( the Arthur Griffith sense), dancing at the crossroads etc.

Or as signatory number 45 to the petition put it "Long live the land of saints, scholars, heroin, corruption, small-minded bigotry, paedophilia and drunken violence"

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