British-Irish Co-operation
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-24
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

There is an application in for support. That is designed to capture exactly what the Deputy articulated regarding the story of Omeath, the Irish language and the migratory pathway to west Belfast. That would be very interesting. I presume the county council or somebody has submitted this and it can be covered. We will keep an eye out for that. That is exactly what was envisaged by the Shared Home Place initiative out of the shared island initiative.
On Deputy Moynihan's point, the Welsh approach to the rejuvenation of the Welsh language is the gold standard template that we should all endeavour to emulate. We have, as a country, in terms of TG4, which was really inspired by Welsh TV. There is Raidió na Gaeltachta and the other initiatives we have taken. I fully support full immersion Gaelcholáistí but the aonaid have a place too. I do not think it is an either-or all the time. From an educational perspective, there are pluses and merits. In Cork, we have quite a number of full immersion and we have aonaid that have worked extremely well also. There is a strong tradition in our part of the country in the whole Gaelscolaíocht area and Gaelcholáistí. It has made a lot of progress.
On Deputy Ó Murchú's point on taxation and remote working, it is an issue that we discussed recently in the Labour Employer Economic Forum, LEEF, group, which is the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, group of unions, IBEC and the Government. We meet regularly on labour market issues but we discussed this. This is an ongoing issue - the taxation treatment of workers North and South - and I am concerned about it. If I am honest, we have not made a whole of progress on it. The Department of Finance is working on it. It is meant to be developing a paper for us. I will pursue that with it. It is a fair point.
On Deputy O'Hara's point, what I said as Gaeilge was that there was a lot more substance in the shared island project than the Sinn Féin platform. For decades, I have been listening to Sinn Féin saying that Government must do this and Government must do that. It has not even produced a paper. It has not produced a single paper on its vision other than slogans. The shared island-----

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-24