merrion street

The Government Chief Whip and Minister of State for the Irish Language, the Gaeltacht and the Islands, Joe McHugh TD, announced today, Monday 9 July 2018, that it is proposed to prepare and implement a comprehensive language plan for Castlebar.

Foras na Gaeilge will now welcome applications from any organisation that is interested in preparing a plan for Castlebar and the lead-organisation will be selected from those applications.

The Minister of State said:

This announcement will start the language planning process under the Gaeltacht Act in Castlebar. Foras na Gaeilge will select an organisation that will accept the duty of preparing and implementing a language plan on behalf of Castlebar to achieve Gaeltacht Service Town status for the town.

The Minister of State said that he envisaged that all interested parties who held influence in the town would be willing to play an active part in strengthening the state of the Irish language - which will benefit both the Irish language and the town.

Under the process, organisations will be given a period of up to one month to make applications to Foras na Gaeilge to be selected as an organisation to prepare and implement a language plan for the town. Once an organisation is appointed under the process, it will have up to two years to submit a language plan to the Department and a seven-year period to implement the agreed language plan with the help of Foras na Gaeilge.