Vol. 96 No. 20
I move:—
That it is expedient to authorise such payments out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas as are necessary to give effect to any Act of the present session to authorise the provision, for the purposes of law, of standard equivalents in the Irish language for certain terms and to provide for the publication of legal forms and precedents in the Irish language.
Will the Minister say what, exactly, the Money Resolution is supposed to cover? Is it intended to provide a dictionary of the words that are already in use in the statutes? These words are likely to be the basis of a lot of the work that has to be done.
I would like to ask who is to do this work? I understand that a close perusal of the Constitution in Irish reveals the interesting fact that the Constitution says what nobody intended it to say, and that there is considerable confusion because certain persons are claiming to interpret the Constitution literally in Irish: that they are claiming rights under it that it was never meant to give, and are even claiming to deny rights which the Constitution was intended to provide. That is largely because there is an eager battle going on between the expert Irish lexicographers as to the meaning of the words employed in the Irish text of the Constitution. If you are now going to have a set of legal terms, and if we all can produce expert evidence in the courts that the terms contained in the dictionary do not mean what they are meant to be, we will be in a very serious difficulty. Will the Minister tell us what precautions are going to be taken to secure that, in this new dictionary of legal terms, ambiguities similar to those which sprinkle the pages of the Constitution will not arise?
In a case, say, where two scholars think a word means something, and a third scholar thinks it means another thing, will there be an appeal to the Supreme Court as to the true meanning of the word, none of the judges of that court knowing Irish? I would be glad if the Minister would enlighten us on that. After all, the humblest citizen of the State is entitled to know what his rights are. It will be an extremely awkward business if we have to go to the Supreme Court to ask for a decision from judges, who do not know the language, on the precise meaning of the words, some of which, no doubt, will be invented to meet the occasion. Will the body to be set up under this legislation be instructed to invent a word, where no available word is there, because, perhaps, members of the House may not be aware that we are very fecund in the invention of words? We have a Department in this House, and whenever a word turns up in a Bill that is not immediately translatable in Irish, we invent a word upstairs in a minute. Unfortunately, our inventions do not coincide always with some other fellow's invention, and then you have a protracted battle about the two words as to which word is to prevail.
A Tower of Babel.
Every language has to evolve in time, but we are so anxious that ours should evolve rapidly that we are proceeding on lines which no one will ever adopt. So long as we confine ambiguities to articles of ladies' wearing apparel, no great harm will be done.
That does not come within the ambit of this Bill.
Providentially not, or the ladies would not know what they were wearing. We are dealing here with the fundamental and legal rights of individuals, with words which may be the foundation of protracted and expensive litigation. Is it intended that once this foclóir of legal terms is published that it will be illegal to employ any term not appearing in this foclóir to describe the things? In addition to the words prescribed in the publication here envisaged, will it be permissible to continue to use the words that people have been in the habit of using for these things? We are treading on dangerous ground in embarking on a new legal terminology in the Irish language.
The Deputy should not forget that the House has agreed to the principle of the Bill.
That does not trouble him.
But surely it is desirable to arrive at some certainty about this. If we employ three Irish scholars and they give a certain meaning to the words to be used, and if half a dozen other scholars deny their interpretation, are we going to endow the three scholars that we choose for the preparation of this vocabulary with infallibility, and, if so, how are we going to silence the other fellows?
That question would have been relevant on the Second Reading.
It could be argued that we ought to employ them all. We did employ one particular individual——
The Deputy apparently did not hear that, in the opinion of the Chair, he is making a Second Reading speech.
We are discussing what this is going to cost.
Quite.
It is going to cost a great deal. We had one Irish scholar in this country who went down to the Dingle Peninsula and there discovered 3,000,000 Irish words.
That is an evasion.
We ought to consider what we are going to get for our money. Are we going to get a document which is going to be invested by this House with infallibility, or are we going to get the opinion of every available Irish scholar? Perhaps the Minister would indicate the alternative that he proposes to adopt.
The whole object of the Bill is to remove the difficulty referred to by the Deputy. As I said on the Second Reading, an Irish speaker, say from Kerry, may use one phrase, an Irish speaker from Donegal may use another, and an Irish speaker from Connemara may use a third. People will be at liberty to take any chances they like as to the phrases they use, but it is the one that will be certified by the Minister that will be the legal one. If they adopt the words and phrases in the authorised list, then they will be taking no chance. They can be certain that they will be using a word or phrase the meaning of which has been decided by the courts. This Bill was brought in because I understand there was a reluctance on the part of legal people—solicitors and others—to draw up wills or deeds in the Irish language for fear the interpretation given to the forms and words they used might not be what they had intended. When this Bill is passed, the words and phrases certified by the Minister for Justice will be the legal equivalents of the English words. The list that I refer to will be in the form of a dictionary, with the form of the legal terms opposite the Irish phrases. I think that meets the point raised by Deputy Mulcahy.
A substantial list of equivalents in English and Irish exists as a result of their actual use up to date in the framing and translation of the statutes. When we arrive at the point at which the subtleties are to be attended to in the way the Minister intends under this Bill, surely we will have reached the point at which the whole foundation stuff that is there should be made available. A very large number of terms in connection with legal matters are available in the statutes. It would be timely and desirable that they would now be brought together in the form of a dictionary, so that we would have a dictionary of the legal words and terms that have been used up to date.
I am sure that is what is going to happen.
Does the Minister realise what he is plunging into? Has the Attorney-General been consulted in this matter?
Of course, he has. He has drawn up the Bill.
Very well then, if he has drawn up the Bill, he is a more reckless man than I took him to be.
Deputy Dillon certainly ought to be a good judge of reckless people. I never heard a more reckless speaker in my life.
That is a very graceful tribute from the Minister. We can discuss that on another occasion. Does the Minister realise that the words and phrases used in the courts of law have received, from the system of common law that has obtained in this country for several centuries certain highly specialised meanings in accordance with the cases where their form has finally crystallised? Is it intended in this dictionary to take a phrase such as, "all the heirs of his body" and say that, according to the ruling in Shelley's case, this phrase shall be translated into Irish by the following words but outside the ruling in Shelley's case the following words may be used?
Is that not a Second Reading speech?
Surely what you have to envisage here is——
A discussion of the costs of this Bill as related to the Money Resolution.
——the kind of job that has to be done.
The cost of the scheme.
Yes, but before you can ascertain its cost, you must ascertain the nature of the job.
Yes, but on the Second Reading.
If that is the Chair's convinced view, I think it is a new view.
The Chair's view is that the Deputy has been making and is attempting to continue a speech appropriate to Second Stage.
All I want to ask the Minister is, will he tell us how is he going to approach the thing in order that we may ascertain the cost? If he is going to get the Bill that the Attorney-General has drawn up, if he is going to take the foclóir which he says he has before him and hand it to one civil servant and ask him is that all right, the job is not going to be done. This ought to be a job in which highly-paid persons would be consulted and which may take years to do correctly. If you do not do it in that way, if you do not spend the money and hire the men who are competent to do the job, you may be plunging into a sea of sorrow which none of us, but unfortunate litigants down the country, will pay for. We ought to consider that before we go further with this matter with a view to appropriating sufficient money to ensure a job being done which will not cause people unnecessary litigation and hardship.
Is the Money Resolution agreed?
No. I desire to be taken as dissenting.
Does the Deputy wish to be so recorded?
I do.
Resolution agreed to, Deputy Dillon dissenting.
