The Government has announced that it intends to abolish the Fifth Declension of nouns in Irish in order to save money on translating documents. A spokesman for the Department of the Gaeltacht said that the State’s finances were under constant pressure and, as such, it was simply too costly to use five different declensions when translating official documents. “The fact is that the language still has other declensions. There are plenty of nouns to go around in these difficult times,” the spokesman said. The spokesman denied that all Fifth Declension nouns would be scrapped entirely. It was the Government’s intention to “spread them out over the other declensions in order to make the best possible use of the nouns available”. The move was not an act of cultural vandalism, he said, but one of a number of cost-saving measures the Government was forced to undertake. The spokesman denied that the Government intended to make Irregular Verbs regular but would review the situation should the Irregular Verbs become even more irregular.
