Irish language gains full official status in European Union
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Topics: IRISH
NUI Galway is now providing support material in Irish as it relates to the European Union's EPSO recruitment tests
Government Chief Whip and Minister of State for the Gaeltacht and Sport, Jack Chambers TD, said: “The end of the derogation of the status of the Irish language in the European Union is a crucial step in the development and future of the language.
The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media has been committed to ending the derogation of the use of Irish
"The European institutions and the staff of my Department deserve a great deal of credit for putting in place the appropriate structures and initiatives to achieve this goal.
"It was an ambitious project, but thanks to the close cooperation between the EU institutions, the Irish Government and stakeholders under the Advanced Irish Language Skills Initiative among many other initiatives and projects, the European institutions are now ready to translate the full suite of content into Irish along with other official and working languages of the EU.â€
Irish was a treaty language when Ireland became a Member State in 1973, which meant that only EU treaties were translated into Irish.
The Irish Government applied in 2005 for Irish to become an official and working language and it was granted this status on 1 January 2007. Due to the shortage of translation staff and Irish language technological resources at the time, the scope of the status was derogated and the number of documents to be translated into Irish were limited.
There are over 170 Irish language staff in the European institutions today using facilities such as terminology databases, machine translation aids and computer-aided translation software to translate all documents into Irish. That number of staff will be increased to c. 200 early in 2022.
In support of those applying for language posts with the EU in the future, NUI Galway is now providing support material in Irish as it relates to the European Union's EPSO recruitment tests.
The use of the Irish language at an official level is an integral part of the ongoing efforts to ensure that the language is used among future generations.
It is very important to the Irish Government that Irish becomes a full working language in the institutions of the European Union and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media has been committed to ending the derogation of the use of Irish as an official and working language of the European Union.
As part of this work, the Department and the Directorate-General for Translation have taken various initiatives to increase the Irish language resources available to support language services in the EU.
In recent years, the Irish Government-funded LEX/IATE terminology project has been further developed, and the inter-institutional bank of translation memories has continued to grow. In addition, an agreement has been reached between the European Commission and the Irish Government to share the bilingual bodies of Irish national legislation, and this work is now well underway. ■