First, I want to make it clear that, although the Bill was part of the NDNA agreement, the priority given to this issue at this time will bemuse many in Northern Ireland, and I suspect many in this House as well. A Government who say we have to tighten public expenditure and cut the number of quangos then promote a Bill which will have substantial costs attached to it and will set up three more quangos. At this particular time, people will ask whether that is a wise move.
I could understand it if the issues we are addressing today were being totally ignored in public policy in Northern Ireland, but they are not. As I pointed out in an intervention, the Irish language already attracts substantial public funds, and those who wish to speak the Irish language have lots of opportunities to learn it, speak it, promote it and enjoy it in Northern Ireland, running to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds.
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Irish language schools are opened with a fraction of the number of pupils that would see a state school, a voluntary school or Catholic maintained school closed, so there is preferential treatment in the promotion of Irish language in education. A substantial amount of money goes into Irish language broadcasting, too. I do not know how many people listen to the BBC programmes, broadcast at prime times, in the Irish language, but I suspect there are not too many, yet substantial public money goes into that.
Where people wish to have Irish street names in Northern Ireland, they can have them—and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out, sometimes even where they do not want them nationalist councils will impose them at substantial funding. And of course Irish language festivals are granted substantial amounts of money every year.
So the idea that the Irish language is not well catered for in Northern Ireland is wrong. I have nothing against it. Indeed I think I am one of the few Unionist MPs who have done this: when approached by members of the Irish language community to promote a book in my constituency, where there are Irish language speakers, I hired the facility from the council and got the leaflets out. Some keen Irish language speakers attended—very few, I have to say, even though there are a substantial number in my constituency, apparently—and the author of the book was more than thankful that a Unionist had helped facilitate this in a Unionist community. So I am not against people speaking Irish, but I do question whether it should have the priority it has.
I want to make something very clear. We are not erecting a building that is fixed; we are planting a tree today. And we are not planting a slow-growing beech tree; we are planting a fast-growing leylandii language tree, which will absorb huge amounts of public money over time, and unfortunately it will not be possible to apply the high hedges legislation to it because the commissioner will be able to stop anyone trying to cut it down to size. We must bear that in mind.
My second general point is that this legislation was part of the NDNA initiative. It was designed to get the Assembly up and running again. Many commitments were made in that, and the commitments made in respect of this particular aspect have been well overstepped. I am not blaming the Minister for that; I know that he is not too amused by me making some criticism of him, but personal friends do criticise each other now and again, especially when they are wrong.