Mayo County Council gave full back to the Irish Deaf Society in their efforts to get the Government to give official language status to Irish Sign Language this week. Fine Gael, council whip, Cllr Joe Mellett brought forward a notice of motion at the October council meeting calling for the support of this campaign , which was backed by all the members of the council. The meeting was given a presentation in sign language on the difficulties encountered by members of the deaf community in doing everyday business, by Lianne Quigley and an interpreter, where she outlined the goals of the campaign to the councillors. Among the issues she outlined was the fact that for civil court cases or family law cases, deaf people cannot get a translator for the case provided for them by the courts and have to provide one at their own expense, that social welfare offices don’t have staff that can communicate through sign language to assist people and that for medical procedures and check-ups it can be difficult for deaf people to communicate with medical professionals. Other run of the mill daily things such as the lack of subtitles on certain television programmes can cause hardship for deaf people.
Cllr Mellett told the meeting that some 5,000 people in Ireland are deaf and use sign language and when you add in their family and friends who use it to communicate with them, there are in the region of 20,000 people who use sign language on a regular basis. There was cross-party support for the motion, with Cllr Al McDonnell telling the meeting, “it’s only when you see a presentation like this you realises how lucky you are in life to be able to hear.”
