MEP again challenges Poots to abandon Irish Language Act
02 July 2007
Following receipt of FOI documentation which reveals that even before the consultation process was over DCAL had instructed parliamentary draftsmen to begin work on an Irish Language Bill, Jim Allister MEP has again called on Edwin Poots MLA to abandon the proposal for legislation.
STATEMENT BY JIM ALLISTER MEP
“Documentation received by me today, under a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that long before DCAL’s supposedly open-minded consultation on possible Irish Language legislation closed, DCAL had instructed the parliamentary draftsmen to start work on the clauses for an Irish Language Bill.
The first consultation was due to run till 2 March 2007, yet it now emerges that on 7 February 2007 legislative counsel were instructed by DCAL to start work on the draft clauses for a Bill. Thus, as I long suspected, the consultation process was a farce and DCAL instead of being genuinely interest in obtaining public opinion was working to a pre-determined political agenda to speed Irish Language legislation onto the statute book.
It was because the consultation process was so irredeemably flawed that I have constantly urged Minister Poots to scrap the farcical consultation which he inherited. Sadly, he seems in awe of his civil servants and incapable of taking a justified ministerial decision to abandon what is now a wholly discredited process. Nonetheless, on foot of this new revelation I am again calling on the Minister to waken up and disentangle himself from the web of deceit that has hallmarked the Irish Language process.”
