Calls for EU parliament to step-up use of Welsh language

Parliament’s president is being urged to back the use of Welsh  following its recently awarded status as a co-official EU language.

UK MEP Jill Evans told this website on Thursday that she has met with parliament’s president Hans-Gert Pöttering, in an attempt to secure an agreement about the use of Welsh in meetings and correspondence.

Evans said that she had been in contact with over 100 organisations in Wales who had said that they would make active use of Welsh in the parliament.

“We have had letters from all these organisations in Wales to show that there is a demand for this,” she told theparliament.com.

South Wales Police, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and CND Cymru are among the organisations that have put their names behind the call for the use of Welsh in the European parliament.

Evans said that she didn’t anticipate any problems regarding parliament accepting correspondence in Welsh, as it does already with other minority languages such as Catalan and Basque, but that parliament was so far unwilling to accept interpretation services for the language.

“They are still refusing to contemplate simultaneous interpretation. This is something we will take up again, because it doesn’t mean you have to have translators available all the time in all meetings. You can have translators who would follow an MEP around…it’s not as difficult as they seem to make out,” she said.

Evans was speaking during a press conference on Thursday at the Welsh Assembly’s Brussels office, to mark the first official use of Welsh at the EU level.

Welsh Heritage Minister Alun Ffred Jones addressed the European culture council in his native language, an event which, he said, caused some initial confusion.

“Suddenly the room went a bit quiet…people must have thought that the [UK representative] must have lost his marbles and had to be taken away by the men in white coats,” he said.

Evans said that although there was still work to be done, she was very pleased that Welsh was finally being used, to a limited extent, at EU level.

“I was elected to parliament nearly ten years ago, and when I first came I never believed that we would ever get this far,” she said.

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