Stádas na Gaeilge san Eoraip
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-14
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Alan Dillon (FG), Mayo

I thank the Senator for raising this important question. I am taking this on behalf of the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Thomas Byrne.
I will begin by outlining the background to this issue. Irish has been a treaty language since 1973, the year of Ireland's accession, meaning that only the EU treaties were translated into Irish. In 2005, after a long period of campaigning, the Irish Government applied for Irish to become an official and working language in the EU. It was granted this status two years later, in January 2007. However, due to a shortage of translation staff and technological resources, it was announced that there would be a limit to the amount of material provided in Irish compared to other European languages. This limit has been extended on a number of occasions.
In 2015, following a request from the Irish Government, the EU agreed to gradually bring the derogation arrangement to an end by 1 January 2022. At midnight on 31 December 2021, the Irish language was granted full official and working status in the European Union, meaning it was now on a par with all other official EU languages. However, on 12 March 2024, the European Parliament passed a derogation from this requirement, Rule 168, in the case of adequate precautions having been taken, interpreters or translators required for an official language are not available in sufficient numbers. The European Parliament determined that it has insufficient capacity to allow full interpretation service in Irish and Maltese and therefore extended Rule 168 to the end of the tenth parliamentary term in 2029 for these two languages.
The only documents which are guaranteed translation are legal Acts of general application. Despite this, the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, which led on the promotion of the Irish language across all EU institutions, has confirmed that the European Parliament makes a very high percentage of its documentation available in Irish - 80% in both 2022 and 2023 and over 90% in 2024. While a relatively large number of documents is being translated into Irish, the problem primarily arises during committee sessions, where the Parliament continues to assert that there is an insufficient number of personnel to allow for live interpretation into and from the Irish language. I understand this is generally not an issue in plenary sessions.
Increasing the number of Irish interpreters across the EU institutions is a priority for the Government and forms part of wider efforts to increase the number of Irish officials in the EU as part of the strategy, A Career for EU. An extensive series of measures designed to increase the number of Irish language interpreters available to the EU institutions has been ongoing since 2018, including funding for additional third level courses and an internship programme for translators, proofreaders and conference translators within the European Union institutions. This has been achieved with the active support, including financial, of the EU. This issue is raised on a regular basis in the Parliament at both official and political level. We will continue to argue for the ending of the derogation and against any proposal to extend it beyond 2029.
To conclude on a positive note, we continue to work alongside our MEPs to highlight this issue. The 2026 Presidency will be the first Irish Presidency since Irish became a fully operational working language of the European Union in January 2022. The Irish Presidency will demonstrate the Union's commitment to linguistic diversity by integrating Irish into Council business, official communications and cultural events.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:57+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-14