Vol. 490 No. 6
17 Mr. D. Carey asked the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands the way in which she proposes to address the decline in spoken Irish in Gaeltacht areas as evidenced by recent figures extracted from the census reports indicating that this decline is quite serious. [10822/98]
As this question which relates to the Irish language has been put to me in English I will answer it in English even though I would prefer to answer such parliamentary questions in Irish.
The recently published report of the Central Statistics Office on the principal socio-economic results of the 1996 census of population contains a section on the Irish language. The question asked in the 1996 census "Can the person speak Irish" along with a question on frequency of use represented a major departure from the question used in censuses since 1961. The version in use prior to 1996 asked respondents to write "Irish only", "Irish and English", "Read but cannot speak Irish" or to leave blank as appropriate. The CSO report refers to the fact that the new question asked in the 1996 census gives rise to a discontinuity with the results of previous censuses and that for that reason no retrospective comparisons can be made.
While the CSO report contains wide-ranging data I am unclear as to how the Deputy has interpreted that data as indicating that there is a decline in spoken Irish in Gaeltacht areas. While the results of the 1996 census cannot be directly compared with the results of the 1991 census as the questions asked were different, it is worth noting that the 1996 census reported that 76.3 per cent of the population of the Gaeltacht aged three years and over indicated that they were Irish speakers compared with 71 per cent in 1991.
It can be deduced from the CSO report on the 1996 census that approximately 43 per cent of the population of the Gaeltacht indicate that they speak Irish on a daily basis. As there is no comparable data from previous censuses it is not possible to say whether this figure represents an increase or a decline on previous years. I am well aware, however, that there are many areas in the Gaeltacht in which the use of Irish is in decline. There are other areas, however, in which this is not the case.
