The European Commissioner responsible for education and culture has said that giving the Irish language official status in the EU would do nothing to help it, writes Denis Staunton in Brussels.
In an interview with The Irish Times, Ms Viviane Reding said the fate of Irish would be determined in Ireland rather than in Brussels.
"You know what you should do in Ireland? Speak Irish, write Irish, be proud of Irish, use Irish in everyday language and show Irish culture to the 24 nations around you. But making it an official language doesn't bring you a thing," she said.
Luxemburgish and Irish are the only two official national languages in the EU that do not enjoy official status in the European institutions.
Ms Reding, who is from Luxembourg, said her country decided not to seek official status for its language despite the fact it is spoken by the whole population.
"It is spoken by everybody - in the streets, in the families, between friends, in the Parliament. Luxemburgish is a real fact of society so we utilise this language," she said.
Despite its lack of official status in the EU and enormous exposure to bigger languages, Luxemburgish was thriving, she said. Twenty-six radio and television stations, most of them commercial, broadcast in Luxemburgish to a population of just half a million.
"Most of those are directed towards adolescents, not to older people. There is a whole new trend to do radio in Luxemburgish."
Ms Reding, who speaks French, German and English as well as Luxemburgish, maintains that Europeans need to speak two languages besides their mother tongue to take full advantage of European integration. In Ireland and Britain, however, the teaching of foreign languages is in decline.
"You are islands and you have an island mentality and you're coming from a dominant language. Mind you, the situation is quite different on the French-German border where you can only survive by speaking more than one language."
The Commission called this week for a three-fold expansion of European education exchange programmes such as Erasmus, Leonardo and Socrates. But the countries that pay most into the EU budget have called for a cap on spending after 2006, a proposal that would leave little room for expanding any programmes. "Those countries that make these declarations don't want to cut agricultural spending, which is half of the Union's budget. Education spending is 0.8 per cent of the Union's budget. So we are speaking about peanuts," she added.