City could lose Gaeltacht tag

A NEW analysis predicts that areas of Galway city currently classified as being in the Gaeltacht — with a population of 14,000, or about one fifth of the city’s total — would lose that status if Gaeltacht boundaries were to be redrawn, under new linguistic criteria recommended to the Government.The analysis, carried out by GMIT Maths lecturer, Donncha Ó hÉallaithe, estimates that as much as two thirds of the Galway Gaeltacht could lose its Gaeltacht status — which entitles Irish-speaking residents to such incentives as improved grants towards house purchase and home improvements.It used data from Census 2006 with regard to the use of Irish in each of the 152 Gaeltacht Electoral Districts and data from the Department of the Gaeltacht with regard to the extent to which Irish is used as a language in the home, and found that only 16,000 of the 45,000 people who live in officially designated Gaeltacht areas of County Galway,would retain their Gaeltacht status, if the minimum criteria recommended in the recently published 'Comprehensive Linguistic Study into the use of Irish in the Gaeltacht’ was applied to the Galway Gaeltacht.Of the 29,000 people who would lose their Gaeltacht status, 14,000 live.............................