Council apologises for not translating draft County Development Plan into Irish

Language Commissioner Rónán Ó Domhnaill has criticised Cork County Council over the lack of Irish translations of townlands and villages.

Senior officials at Cork County Council have apologised for breaching legislation by not producing complete Irish language versions of the latest draft County Development Plan (CDP).

However, they insist that the timeframe for compiling such documents is too short to get a team of translators in place and still meet statutory deadlines. 

The issue was raised at County Hall by Fianna Fáil councillor Gobnait Moynihan, who was reacting to criticism levied against the local authority by the Language Commissioner Rónán Ó Domhnaill.

In his annual report issued late last week, Mr Ó Domhnaill found the council hadn’t published the complete draft CDP in Irish and used English names for townlands and villages in the county’s Gaeltacht areas, instead of Irish versions as it is obliged to do.

Ms Moynihan, a fluent Irish speaker who is living in the mid-Cork Gaeltacht, took exception to this. She pointed out that this wasn’t the first time this had happened because she had raised similar concerns about the omissions of Irish when the last CDP draft was issued in 2017.

She said it is clear the council had again not adhered to its legal obligations.

Clodagh Henehen, the council’s assistant chief executive, said the local authority takes “its (legal) obligations seriously” and the omissions “were not done deliberately". The council’s chief planner Michael Lynch, who is in overall charge of CDPs, said he “regrets” what happened, and some fail-safes had been put in place to prevent a repetition.

Time constraints

However, he added that the statutory time between publishing draft plans and their final implementation is simply too short for a county the size of Cork to get all the documentation translated in time.

Mr Lynch said the council has written to the Department of Housing, Local Government & Heritage to request these deadlines be extended.

On the advice of councillors, he said he will also correspond with the department responsible for the Gaeltacht on the same issue.

Ms Moynihan accepted there is an issue with the tight timeframe for translation and acknowledged it would need “a lot of translators” working flat out to put CDPs into Irish.

But she suggested it might be better if the council gave out bits of it at a time to translators which could ease the burden on them, rather than giving them the whole document in one go.