Appropriation Bill 2025: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-17
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Aengus Ó Snodaigh (SF), Dublin South-Central

That would be a useful engagement in terms of parliamentary language. There has been a campaign over the years called plain English. We should have the same for Irish, where we make our legislation as accessible to the public as possible. Where there are words that have double meanings we should put in a different word. That has implications obviously in law. We have to make sure that the word can stand up and that we specify in legislation what it was previously known as and so on. In the future especially, we will be able to address issues like that because everything will be available on computer. The line between this year's and next year's legislation will be a lot easier than pulling down different bits off the shelf. Maybe in the future that can be looked at but it not just this legislation as there is a load of legislation where words, which are not in common practice - they might be correct - make it difficult for people to understand our legislation in Irish or in English. The legislation is sometimes gobbledygook and it is even more gobbledygook if a Title is put on it that can be totally misconstrued. In this case, I believe that is one of those. The vast majority of Irish speakers would not have a clue what it meant other than presuming that it is a toilet Bill. It is not and we know that. We know what we are discussing. It would be good if that can be taken on board when people are looking at miscellaneous provisions Bills and stuff like that. Often that is where we can correct mistakes that have been there over years or where people have identified problems.
If we started using the Title 100 years ago, that does not mean that it was necessarily correct. One hundred years ago, there was a big debate about whether the Free State would be termed "Saorstát" or whether a republic was a saorstát. There was a big debate about the Titles because they were not common parlance. The words used for our parliamentary procedures all came from Westminster or a coiste téarmaíochta was set up to identify words that may have been used in the past, a couple of hundred years before that, and which might relate to those. They might not necessarily ever have been used in the form they are now being used in, but they were appropriated at the time. This is no different than most people using "carr", rather than "gluaisteán" in Irish, for car. The word the coiste téarmaíochta came up with was gluaisteán but most people do not use that. The question is how should we reflect that in law.
I will not delay any further on this. I will withdraw the amendment, based on the fact that we will try to have a discussion about this in terms of terminology and legislation.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:29+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-17