Ireland's permanent representative to the European Union, Ms Anne Anderson, was expected to table a motion at a meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels this afternoon calling for enhanced recognition of the Irish language by the Union.
The motion was due to be tabled at the meeting which began at 2 p.m. Once tabled, the ambassadors will take it back to their own governments for consideration.
The Government is proposing that certain key EU legislation would be translated into Irish. Under the proposal, the possibility of extending the range of documents to be translated into Irish would be the subject of a review to take place not later than four years after adoption of the current proposal.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Ahern, said the proposal, if agreed by the Member States, "would represent a significant positive and practical step forward for the Irish language in the EU."
The Government's decision last July to seek official status for the language came following a lengthy public campaign led by the language rights group Stádas.
A cross-party motion calling for the recognition of Irish by the EU was passed unanimously by Dáil Éireann in February and up to 80,000 signatures were collected in an online petition calling on the Government to ask that Irish be included as an official EU language.
The Government's decision to seek enhanced status for the language was seen as a victory for the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Mr Ó Cuív, who said that there was "unanimous" support among his colleagues for the move.
"This will put Irish on a par with Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Maltese, if it is successful, and we are confident that it will be," he said last July.
Stádas argues that having Irish as an EU official language would bring economic as well as cultural benefits to Ireland.
The Government will request an amendment of Council Regulation 1/1958, which governs the languages used in the European institutions, to give Irish equal status to the 20 current official languages of the EU. The Government will, however, ask for a derogation similar to that negotiated for Maltese, which will mean that not all official documents will be translated into Irish.
A report in today's Irish Timesindicated that most member-states are sympathetic to the proposal but Spain wants any amendment to embrace a change in the status of Catalan, Basque and two other languages used in that country. Any change in the language regulation requires the support of all 25 EU member-states.
