The British Government Commitment to Enact the Irish Language Act

Abstract

The previous chapters in this book have dealt with the Irish language context in the period preceding the 1998 GFA, the establishment of the devolved Assembly in 1999 and its five-year suspension from 2002. This suspension period was characterised by fragmented stop-start CR talks culminating in October 2006 with the St Andrews Agreement (SAA) which outlined agreed measures designed to re-establish devolution. In the SAA, the British government committed itself to enacting an Irish language Act. The British and Irish governments set a deadline of 26 March 2007 for devolution and warned that if the two key parties, Sinn Féin (SF) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had not entered power-sharing arrangements by then, they faced prolonged direct rule and the dissolving of the devolved institutions for the foreseeable future.