The Government proposal to have Irish recognised by the EU is a modest one, writes Denis Staunton in Brussels
The Government's formal request to have Irish recognised as an official and working language of the European Union marks the start of serious negotiations on the issue that could last a number of months.
Irish officials said that EU ambassadors yesterday gave a cautiously positive response to the proposal, which must be approved by all member-states, although Spain wants any change in the EU's language regime to improve the status of a number of its languages, such as Catalan and Basque.
The Government's proposal is a modest one, calling for a more restricted regime even than that agreed for Maltese earlier this year. For a transitional period of four years, only legislative acts agreed jointly by the Council and the European Parliament will be translated into Irish.
After that, a review could consider extending the range of documents to be translated into Irish - although any change at that stage is also likely to require the unanimous approval of all our EU partners.
In 2003, such legislative acts amounted to 1,400 pages and are expected to cover between 1,500 and 2,000 pages this year. Such documents represent a tiny proportion of those produced by the EU each year.
In 2003, for example, the Commission translated 110,000 pages into Danish.
Mr Guhane Lonnroth, the director general of the EU's translation service, said that the EU's linguistic services, which provide translation and interpretation, cost about €1.2 billion a year - or €60 million for each of the 20 official and working languages.
The Commission calculates that it needs 110 full-time translators for each language, more than half of whom are permanent staff.
Mr Lonnroth acknowledges that a more restricted regime would require fewer translators.
He points out, however, that legislative acts require especially highly skilled translators and the Commission almost always does such work in-house.
"The translation of legal documents is very precise. Put a comma in the wrong place and you can get a court case against the Commission. As a principle, we don't outsource the translation of legal texts," he said. Mr Lonnroth stresses that the Commission does not express a view on the political debate surrounding the status of Irish but he suggests that, from the citizen's point of view, legislative acts agreed by Council and the European Parliament may not be the most useful texts to have translated.
"The co-decision documents don't tell you much about citizens' rights. Other documents produced by the Commission, such as agricultural regulations, often contain much more relevant information," he said.
In the case of Maltese, the EU has agreed that, by the end of its transitional period in 2007, all documents not already translated into Maltese will be translated. In effect, this means that the Commission has to translate almost everything into Maltese in order to avoid a backlog in two years' time.
The Irish proposal includes no such requirement, so the number of translators needed is likely to be much smaller. Mr Lonnroth says, however, that a change in the language's status would require the employment of a number of accomplished Irish speakers who would be available to respond to citizens' inquiries on a vast range of policy issues.
The Government's proposal does not mention interpretation but any change is likely to mean that MEPs can address the European Parliament in Irish if they choose to do so. Mr Seán Ó Neachtain is the only native Irish speaker in the Parliament, although Mr Proinsias De Rossa, who opposes any change in the status of the language, is a fluent Irish speaker.
Mr Ian Andersen of the EU's Interpreters' Service says that, although every effort is made to provide interpretation at ministerial meetings, it is often difficult to provide coverage for smaller languages. "There are only eight Maltese interpreters in the world and some of them also cover the European Parliament," he said.
Mr Andersen says that, when he checked with the International Association of Conference Interpreters on the number of Irish-speakers accredited, he found none. "It may be that there is a talent mass we haven't heard of yet," he said.
EU interpreters need to be comfortable speaking about such diverse issues as Asian trade policy and the banking system in Albania and the institutions have difficulty recruiting the 80 interpreters they sometimes need for each language in a single day. If Irish ministers require no more than occasional interpretation from Irish at a handful of meetings each year, Mr Andersen says that such coverage would be provided by freelance interpreters.
He warns, however, that the linguistic services could suffer if politicians start using language as a means of political display rather than as a means of effective communication within Europe. "For 20 years, we have been providing interpretation where people really needed it, not as political window-dressing," he said.