Gaeltacht Areas Must Be Compensated For Loss Of Summer Colleges
On April 20th it was announced that the Gaeltacht Summer Colleges would not be opening their doors this summer. The decision, taken due to safety concerns around Covid-19, was an economic and social hammer-blow to the Gaeltacht regions.
Every summer thousands of secondary school students make the journey to various Gaeltacht around the country. While there, they enjoy a genuine immersive experience in the Irish language and a rural Irish community. Hundreds of thousands of Irish adults recall with fondness their summer, or summers, spent in the Gaeltacht as a rite of passage.
For many, the three-week summer course kindles a lifelong love of An Ghaeilge, encouraging the youth of today to become the Irish language activists, teachers, poets and writers of tomorrow.
A rite of passage and vital economic lifeline for our Gaeltacht communities
As important as the experience that students take home with them, is what they bring to the Gaeltacht on an annual basis. In regions that have been scarred by inter-generational emigration, the students of the Irish colleges inject a youthful lease of life.
They also bring in a vital cash flow to remote regions which have been neglected economically and politically by every government since the foundation of the Twenty-Six County state in 1922.
It is estimated that the Summer colleges are worth about €50,000,000 (€50m) to the Gaeltacht economy annually. They employ teachers and other staff at the colleges themselves, as well as giving an income stream to the families who provide accommodation and food to the students during their stay. The students also spend in local shops, cafés and other businesses.
The loss of such a huge amount of money will have a profound impact on these Gaeltacht communities - a situation made worse by the general economic downturn that is set to accompany the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is now almost two months since the cancellation of the Summer colleges was announced and yet still the Dublin government has not yet announced any financial package to compensate for the loss of income to the colleges, host families or wider Gaeltacht communities.
Éirígí For A New Republic is calling on the Dublin Government to immediately announce a rescue package of tens of millions of euros to these colleges and the Gaeltacht economy that exists around them. The infrastructure of the Summer Colleges must be protected so that it can be ready to go for the summer of 2021. A failure to do so would represent another hammer blow to the Gaeltacht communities and the Irish language.