Reporting Irish-language contributions in the Official Report

In common with many other countries, Ireland has two official languages and contributions in both languages are reported in the Official Report.

Unlike some other countries, such as Canada, the Debates Office does not produce two versions of the debate but rather it reports the speakers in whatever language they use. Throughout the history of the Oireachtas, debates in the Irish language have tended to fall into two broad categories. From the very beginning, Irish has been used during solemn occasions to underline their significance. In this way, the business of the early sittings of both the First and Second Dáileanna was conducted mainly in Irish.

More broadly, at other times, Irish has been used in debates on constitutional matters. For instance, in June 1928 future Ceann Comhairle Frank Fahy opposed a constitutional Bill in the face of some heckling — in Irish — by General Richard Mulcahy on the Irish for “maximum”. Similarly, the Report Stage debate on the proposed new Constitution in June 1937 saw an exchange in both languages on the accuracy of the spelling in the document’s Irish-language version.

Deputies have sometimes used Irish when discussing sensitive subjects. For instance, in March 1949, Thomas Derrig used Irish to discuss the provisions of a Bill that proposed to place girls under 15 who had been “sexually contaminated” but who had not committed a crime into a special school run by “the religious authorities”.

By the early 1960s, however, a commission on the revival of Irish chaired by the future Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiach noted that one third of Deputies “have a good knowledge of Irish”. Nevertheless, the report noted it was still the case that less than 2% of debates were in that language, for reasons that included the “fear that speeches in Irish would not be as fully reported as those in English”. In 1977, the Editor of Debates and Chief Reporter, Éamon Ó Faoláin, estimated that only 1% of debates were in Irish. It has been estimated that by the mid-2010s, the percentage had increased to between 2% and 3%.

How has the Debates Office handled Irish-language debates?

While the Debates Office has always published contributions in the language used by a Member, reporting Irish-language speeches has posed some challenges to the team. In the first instance, no Irish-language shorthand system was available to reporters. John Ward, a reporter working in the 1950s, recalled his “schizolingual” method in which he used to write the Irish he heard in the Chamber in English shorthand and then translate it back into Irish when dictating his take. In the early 1960s, future Editor Éamon Ó Faoláin adapted the Gregg shorthand system to devise an Irish-language version but it does not appear to have been adopted by the team.

The continued dominance of English in the Houses has affected the ability of the Debates Office to attract and retain people with the requisite high level of competence in both Irish and English. By the 1980s, it had proven impossible to recruit reporters with both shorthand and Irish, and so the Debates Office was forced into measures like taping Irish-language contributions and employing outsiders, usually retirees, to transcribe them.

The position improved from 1992 onwards when the reporting team moved away from shorthand and it became somewhat easier to recruit reporters who had a high standard of Irish. In 2014, a competition specifically to recruit a bilingual stream of reporters was held for the first time.