The Dáil yesterday passed a Bill to remove an obligation on NUI Galway to give preference to job candidates who have fluency in Irish. Instead the University College Galway (Amendment) Bill imposes an obligation to ensure that the "strategic development plan of the university contains a provision for the delivery of education through the Irish language".
Minister for Education Mary Hanafin said the previous Act, dating back to 1929, "represents an outdated and unfair impediment on NUI Galway in seeking to develop international standard excellence in research and teaching".
"If NUI Galway is to develop to its full potential in the 21st century knowledge era, it needs to be free to attract and appoint the best academics and researchers."
Fine Gael education spokeswoman Olwyn Enright said the Bill "gives NUI Galway the autonomy and choice that it needs and that Irish needs to develop organically through use and learning".
Ms Enright expressed surprise at the Minister's "conversion" to the principle of choice, given that she had attacked as "auction politics", proposals by Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny to drop compulsory Irish after the Junior Certificate.
The Minister said, however, that secondary-level Irish was different.
Labour TD Michael D Higgins (Galway East) who taught at UCG from the end of the 1960s, pointed out that "the standard of scholarship, be it in the humanities or in the sciences, was never lessened by the fact that people were able to practise their scholarship and teach through the medium of Irish".
He said he looked forward to the "removal of any suggestion that the university would be abusing the filter of the Irish language".
