It’s official - Irish is an EU language
The Irish language overcame Dutch objections to win recognition as an EU official language yesterday, but the next challenge facing the Irish government will be to provide trained interpreters and translators.
Scríobh mé ríomhphost chuig mo chomhoibrithe ón Netherlands ag gearáint faoin freasúra ón dtír sin don Gaeilge!
Oh my Gawd! The Irish language is now an EU official language! This must be the ultimate plot by the Brits to wreck the EU. They’ll point to the absurd waste of resources involved and hint that Catalan and Basque are next. The EU is fast becoming a byword for anti-democracy and daftness so this does it. I mean, once the weight of another obscure language is added to the mountain of paper being churned out, people will just turn away in disgust. Just as they did in Holland and France already. Will Irish be the final nail in the EU coffin?
How ignorant can you get. Eamonn Fitzgerald obviously is unaware of what is happening in the modern world. Languages, especially ones with a huge amount of cultural depth and history like Irish, are increasingly important. Inh the real world, no one single language, even one as powerful as English, can not realistically dominate the world. In any case, as much as Irish is rather obscure to the average English speaker, it is more related to English than Finnsh or Maltese (amoung others), which are also official EU languages. And, before anybody starts saying that Irish is a dead language (and one must remember that that has already been said since the 1890s), there are AT LEAST 104,000 people in Ireland right now using it fluently as a daily means of communication. And, according to the censuses (N & S of the border) at least 1,000,000 people (that’s with scrutiny) can speak the language very well, fluently, or as a native language.
Is lá an-mór é seo don Ghaeilge go náisiúnta, agus don daoine léi acu. Suas leis an Ghaeilge!
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