Member's statement: Irish Language: Minister for Communities

Member's statement by Mr Colm Gildernew on 15 September 2025.

MLA

Mr Colm Gildernew

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

15 September 2025

Type

Member's statement

Business

Members' Statements

Heading

Irish Language: Minister for Communities

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5099110

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Beidh mé ag labhairt as Gaeilge ar dtús. Ar an drochuair, is gá dom aird a tharraingt arís ar chur chuige do-ghlactha an Aire Pobal i dtaca leis an Ghaeilge.

The Minister for Communities has responsibility for developing an Irish language strategy. Although, to date, the Minister has failed to publish one, he clearly has his own strategy for the Irish language. It is a strategy to prevent the development of Irish and work against its ongoing growth on this island. It is a strategy to undermine and attack Irish at every opportunity. In his decision to remove trilingual letterheads from his Department, it is a strategy to make Irish invisible. Unfortunately, that is one of a number of interventions that the Minister and his party have made to thwart the development of Irish, including blocking additional funding from the Southern Government for North/South bodies including Foras na Gaeilge and opposing Irish-language signs at Grand Central station. The Irish language has endured attacks before and survived. It will endure these attempts to undermine and suppress it as well.

178 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Flagged Irish language, Ulster-Scots and language policy

Second assessment

Jev’s answers did not settle this record, so a second model, claude-opus-5-5, read the same text (without the MLA’s name or party) and gave its reasons on 21 October 2026. How the second assessment works

Verdict

Flagged

Public interest or divisiveness

Mixed

Against the published rubric

The statement's central point is that one community's language is being deliberately slighted, describing a ministerial "strategy to undermine and attack Irish at every opportunity" and "to make Irish invisible". That fits the rubric's cultural grievance test. It also accuses "the Minister and his party" of a concerted effort to "suppress" the language, which is the kind of claim of hostility towards a culture that the rubric treats as identity-based, rather than criticism of a policy record alone. It cites real decisions, including the unpublished strategy, the letterheads, Foras na Gaeilge funding and the Grand Central signage, but makes no practical request and offers no analysis of them.

Public interest or divisiveness

There is some substance here: the lack of a published Irish language strategy is a legitimate matter of ministerial accountability, and the listed decisions are real policy choices. However, the statement uses them mainly to build a narrative of a language under "attack" that has "endured attacks before and survived". This keeps a recognised flashpoint going rather than scrutinising the decisions on cost, legality or service delivery. The same framing would be judged divisive if used about a minister's treatment of Ulster-Scots or British symbols.

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:07 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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