A community response

The proposed agreement represents an historic development for the Irish language community by potentially providing legal protection to our community for the first time in the history of a state, which has discriminated and excluded us for almost a century.

This progress rests solely on our grassroots community led Dream Dearg campaign, which empowered communities to challenge the status quo and speak truth to power. That this was possible is testament to the courageous endeavours of the Irish language revival movement stretching back to the foundation of the one party state where language activists were imprisoned for daring to speak or promote our language. Those days are long gone.

In particular, we salute the pioneering efforts of the Shaws Road Gaeltacht community who inspired the contemporary language revival with their revolutionary self-help housing project 50 years ago. They stood up against all the odds and laid the foundations that we continue to build on today.

For ten years, the last Stormont power sharing executive failed to protect us and afford us our rights. It facilitated our communities’ exclusion and its 2016 Programme for Government defined us out of existence. The Dream Dearg campaign, from then until now, has proved that ordinary people can make change happen from below. We are proud to have played a positive role in enabling civil society to reclaim its democratic voice in holding those with power and responsibility to account.

This legislation falls far short, however, of our campaign objectives and what we were promised 14 years ago in an internationally binding agreement at St Andrews. We campaigned for a standalone rights-based act mirroring the experience of Wales and the Republic of Ireland. This agreement hasn’t brought us there.

It is a start and an advancement but is not our final destination. But we no longer sit at the back of the bus. We will not return to the margins, but will continue to campaign vociferously for the fulfilment of all our outstanding rights and a democratic and socially just future for our communities.

We will hold this new power-sharing executive to account on the implementation of this Irish language legislation, including the office of the Language commissioner and resolve to rigorously test its legislative clauses in protecting our community.

If political vetoes are used, however, to obstruct and hinder rights and resources for our community then the new arrangements and its current reincarnation are set to fail and fall again.

The progress made with this deal is merely a staging post in the upward trajectory of our ongoing campaign and we will also work diligently towards exposing any glaring gaps in the legislation that prevent us from playing a fair and equal role in our society. This legislation must afford us the respect and dignity we are entitled to and have waited far too long for.

Our community understands full well that our campaign will continue in the days, weeks and months ahead.

We also welcome all additional funding resources being promised to our community revival through the proposed Irish language strategy which must match the needs of our community and the growing demand for adequate resources, requisite to its sustained growth, since the Good Friday Agreement.

The days of attacks on our community, by those in power, must now be a thing of the past. We are determined moved out of the margins and into the light of a fairer and progressive future.