(Seo alt ónár bhfoireann Gaeltachta. Is féidir an bunleagan as Gaeilge a léamh anseo)

IN A POST on her social media platforms tonight, Northern Ireland’s Minister for the Economy, Caoimhe Archibald of Sinn Féin, announced that she would be intervening to save a place names project that had been at the centre of a funding dispute.

The announcement came after a day of heated exchanges in which nationalist parties accused the Minister for Communities, Gordon Lyons of the DUP, of having withdrawn funding from the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project — £90,000 (€105,000) per year — given the central role the project plays in efforts by local authorities across the North to put bilingual signage in place.

In her post, Minister Archibald said she was “stepping in to ensure the Place-Name Project will continue its vitally important work, providing accurate translations for Irish language street signage and protecting that important heritage.”

The Dream Dearg, a campaigning group for Irish in the North, welcomed the Minister’s announcement.

“An important intervention to preserve a wonderful service and project,” said the group on social media.

“Every attempt by the DUP to erase Irish from view must be opposed and resisted.”
It emerged at the start of this week that funding had been removed from the Place-Name Project and nationalist politicians placed the blame on the DUP Minister.

He defended himself, saying that responsibility for funding the project lay with the Department of Finance.

Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster this morning, Lyons responded to a question from the presenter asking why he had decided to end funding for the project.

“In the first instance, I made no decision — this was a project that had been funded for the past four years by the Department of Finance, not by me or the Department for Communities but by the Department of Finance, which Sinn Féin is in charge of,” he replied.

“I am not saving £90,000, I am not distributing £90,000 elsewhere — the only department that is redistributing £90,000 somewhere else is the Department of Finance, which is under Sinn Féin’s control.

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“Indeed, I have emails in front of me here between officials in the Department for Communities and the Department of Finance from March and April, asking the Department of Finance whether they were willing to continue funding this project, and the response that came back more than once was that they were not willing to fund it any further.”

It emerged, however, in Minister Lyons’ response to an Assembly question, that the Department for Communities had been funding the project between 2022 and 2026 and, in his response to a question from Colm Gildernew of Sinn Féin last month, that officials in his Department had been examining options regarding future funding at that point.

After the decision was announced this evening, DUP leader Gavin Robinson posted on his social media platforms, taunting Sinn Féin and claiming that the party had attempted to conceal its own role, as he alleged, in the dispute in order to lay the blame on Unionists.

This dispute will certainly do nothing to improve the atmosphere between the two major parties in the Executive, with Assembly elections on the horizon in 2027.Sonnet 4.6Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

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