Tá suim mhór agam sa teanga agus tá brón orm nach féidir liom labhairt i nGaeilge amháin inniu. Is cuimhin liom seanfhocal a d'fhoghlaim mé ar scoil: "Éist le fuaim na habhann agus gheobhaidh tú bradán; listen to the sound of the river and you will catch a salmon." I have listened to people in the marketplace and know that there is immense goodwill towards the Irish language. In recent years attitudes towards it have changed. In my company it is used a lot. When the idea was first introduced, I was impressed by the enthusiasm shown for it. Using Irish is also good for business.

In principle, I support the thinking behind the Bill for the same reason I supported the establishment of TG4. We all want to see a situation where the Irish language is perceived as acceptable, interesting and fun. If a language is to be more than a museum piece, it must be possible for people to carry out the main activities in their lives through that medium. Given the standing of the Irish language in the Constitution, it is logical that people should be able to conduct their business with the State through the national language.

However, I cannot support the Bill. The legislation is right, but the timing is wrong. Everybody who has spoken wants to see Irish becoming a widely spoken language, but the Bill does not represent good value for money. In recent months we have heard many sermons to the effect that public spending is in danger of running out of control. In the current economic climate the aim should be to reduce costs, not increase them. The Bill will bring about an unnecessary increase in costs.

Last night I visited the Northern Ireland Assembly where all speeches are translated into three languages: Irish, English and Scots Gaelic. It is good to see such enthusiasm for our various native languages and several translators were on hand. Nevertheless, the implementation of the Bill will have enormous implications for the cost structure of all public bodies. It will add a new layer of expense to the provision of every public service. In addition, sections 21 to 24 indicate that it will bring about the creation of a language police.

At this stage in Ireland's economic development we need this Bill like a hole in the head. Regrettably, the majority of our citizens are not competent to conduct their business as Gaeilge. If everybody could speak Irish, there would be no costs involved in the implementation of the Bill. In fact, there would be no need for it. The reality is very different.

In order to make public services more widely available as Gaeilge, fluency in Irish would have to become a basic entry requirement for all public service jobs. When this approach was tried in the past, it a dismal failure. It led to a culture in which candidates were selected and promoted on the basis of something that had nothing to do with how well they performed in their job.

If such an approach failed at a time of high unemployment, it has no chance of succeeding during a period of almost full employment. It will not work at a time when public service pay rates compare unfavourably with those in the private sector. Beggars cannot be choosers and in the current jobs climate the State is the beggar.

To implement the Bill successfully each public body will have to recruit and maintain a core of staff to service the small number who choose to conduct their business in Irish. I do not deny their constitutional right to demand this service, but economic constraints require that legislation such as this can only be put in place when resources become available. These are words I thought would never pass my lips, but I am using them today. We simply cannot afford this measure. Any Government which claims otherwise is not living in the real world.

Outside of a small group of enthusiasts, there is no public demand for the Bill. By introducing this legislation at this time the Government is seeking to pander to it. As the Government is aware that this legislation will not pass during its lifetime, it is only paying lip service to those who want it. There will be a public outcry when people hear that, instead of improving the health service, the Government proposes to spend money on making services available in Irish.

The economic climate has changed. The days when we could afford to do anything we wanted are over. We can no longer afford luxuries such as this. If we want to make it possible for some to do their business in Irish, something else will have to give. There is something the Government should do for the Irish language, but this Bill is not it.

The real task at hand has been avoided by successive Governments. Given that our young people learn Irish from the first day they start school, why can so few people speak it? Why do so few adults wish to speak Irish in their daily lives?

All of my five children attended the Gaeltacht and a number of them attended Coláiste na Rinne. They emerged from both with an enthusiasm for the language and loved nothing better than to meet their friends and converse in Irish. They do not speak Irish now, however, though a number of them have become fluent in French and Spanish. How did we fail our children and what must we do to succeed in engendering in them a love for the language?

If we have to invest money, enthusiasm, commitment or effort, I would prefer if these were invested elsewhere. There is a massive State apparatus devoted to the teaching of Irish. In spite of that apparatus, however, the vast majority of young people do not learn the language effectively.

I am impressed by what TG4, the establishment of which I supported, has achieved. The station, which was originally Teilifís na Gaeilge, has employed modern marketing methods and uses subtitles in such a way that it makes it easy to watch the programmes shown. In my opinion we can generate enthusiasm for the language, but we must consider how this can be done in both management and marketing terms. I do not believe the Bill is the mechanism to generate that enthusiasm. It is in danger of being seen as pandering to a demand which is, in constitutional terms, understandable, but it will give rise to huge costs and it will not achieve what we are setting out to achieve.

A large number of young people leaving school do so not just with a lack of enthusiasm for but also with a negative attitude to the language. It must be possible to overcome this difficulty, which has been overcome in other countries and, it must be said, in this jurisdiction in other ways. Given that if one spends money on one thing, one cannot spend it on something else, in my opinion the time and resources we devote to forcing Irish down the throats of young people could be better spent in other areas to prepare them better for the highly demanding world they will enter into when they become adults.

The current system of teaching Irish has failed utterly and miserably to engage the majority of the population. Why is that? Why have we failed so badly? It is not that Irish is a particularly difficult language to learn and it is certainly not that we have failed to devote enough time or resources to the teaching of Irish. There must be some other reason for this monumental failure to achieve the objectives we set down for ourselves but which we have not reached. If we genuinely have the interests of the Irish language at heart - I believe the House has shown today that this is the case - we should be asking questions such as those I have posed and we should pursue the answers, regardless of where they lead us. How can we achieve our objectives? How can we obtain the best value for money? How can we ensure that we will achieve what we are setting out to do?

I do not believe we will serve the Irish language well by trying to install another level of compulsion in the form of establishing a language police. I urge the Minister of State to return this Bill to the shelf until such time as more pressing problems in regard to the language have been dealt with and until the emergence of new bright enthusiastic ideas about how we can achieve what we are setting out to do.

Update:

In the inaugural annual report of the office of An Coimisinéir Teanga, published on 14 March 2005, is the following: