Alt é seo atá foilsithe ag ár bhfoireann úr-nua Gaeltachta.  Tá leagan Gaeilge ar fáil anseo.

TG4 HAS ANNOUNCED that the national Irish language broadcaster will not be hosting a debate for the Presidential election.

In response to an inquiry from The Journal, the station’s director general, Deirdre Ní Choistín, said that a debate was not part of the broadcaster’s plan for covering the election which will take place on Friday, October 24.  The last time the station hosted a candidates’ debate before the Presidential election was in 2011.

“TG4 does not intend to host a debate for the Presidential election this year but there will be coverage of the campaign on Nuacht TG4, Nuacht Cúla4 and on 7 Lá,” Ní Choistín said, referring to the station’s news programmes on TG4 and its sister channel for young people, Cúla4, as well as its main current affairs show.

Although independent candidate Catherine Connolly is fluent in Irish, Heather Humphreys, who is standing for Fine Gael, has said that she would take Irish classes if elected. When Jim Gavin appeared before the press after the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party voted for him this week, he said that he had been to the Gaeltacht in his youth and that he had ‘a few words’.

Catherine Connolly, who is the chairwoman of the Oireachtas Committee for the Irish Language, the Gaeltacht and the Irish Speaking Community, is unhappy with TG4′s decision not to hold a debate.

“It is strange that TG4 would have decided not to hold a debate, especially when not all the candidates have been nominated yet,” said Connolly, who also referred to the debate that took place for the 2011 Presidential election.

She said that TG4 viewers should have had the opportunity to have their questions “examined in detail in their own language”.

She also asked how TG4 knew that the other candidates did not speak Irish. “Did TG4 contact them?”

Responses on this question have been sought from the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil campaigns.

In 2011, a debate for the Presidential election was held on TG4, although there was only one fluent Irish speaker among the candidates, Mícheál D Ó hUigínn, who is currently coming to the end of his second term. An interpretation service was available for candidates with limited Irish and they were welcome to answer questions in Irish in English.

TG’s decision to hold a debate was welcomed at the time but, after it was broadcast, some felt that it was unsatisfactory that so much of the programme was in English. According to Seán Tadhg Ó Gairbhí, editor of Tuairisc, an Irish language news website,  it was an insult to the Irish-speaking community. Writing in 2018, he had this to say:

Michael D Higgins was the only one of the eight candidates to speak in Irish during the same debate and it was a poor sight to see him speaking Irish on his own on the Irish-language station he had founded 15 years earlier. The whole thing was like TG4 announcing that the most important thing for them was to be at the centre of the debate, no matter what the language of the debate.

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According to Julian de Spáinn, general secretary of Conradh na Gaeilge, TG4′s decision not to hold a debate in Irish was a “missed opportunity” even though the organisation understood that “it was likely that some of the candidates would not speak enough Irish to take part in a debate”.

“But in that case, and to ensure that TG4 broadcasts a debate on this crucial election for the Irish-speaking and Gaeltacht communities, a different format could not be used, such as having a spokesperson in the debate for any candidate who does not speak Irish well enough.

Candidates who are fluent in Irish should not be disadvantaged or lose out on the opportunity to present their vision for the country to the Irish-speaking and Gaeltacht communities due to the lack of proficiency of other candidates.

In Canada, a country where French and English are official languages, political party leaders hold bi-lingual debates on consecutive nights. In Wales, Welsh broadcaster S4C has the same difficulty as TG4 in finding minority language speakers among candidates. The leaders are interviewed on pre election news and current affairs programmes, a similar approach that TG4 has taken since 2016

Only once has there been a leaders’ debate on TG4  before a General Election and that was in 2011.  Three  of the main party leaders were all accomplished Irish speakers at the time – Mícheál Martin for Fianna Fáil, Enda Kenny from Fine Gael and Éamon Gilmore from the Labour Party.

That debate was regarded as a great success by most but has not been held since due to the absence of one or more Irish speakers among the leaders of the main parties in subsequent campaigns.  

 The Journal’s Gaeltacht initiative is supported by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.