FIONTAR conference on university education in Irish
15 January 2003

The international expert in minority languages, Miquel Strubell i Trueta (see picture), will be the keynote speaker at a conference organised by FIONTAR on the subject of university education in Irish.

The conference - University Education in Irish: Challenges and Perspectives - will be held in the Business School in DCU on 7 and 8 February 2003.

"The purpose of the event is to contribute to the ongoing debate about the future development of university education in Irish", says John Walsh, FIONTAR lecturer and conference co-ordinator.

"Various submissions related to the question have already been published on the website of the Irish Higher Education Authority. FIONTAR wishes to contribute to this debate by focussing on the strategies required to serve the scattered Irish language community, on an all-Ireland basis. To this end, we have invited experts dealing with university education in Ireland and specialists from other countries where minority languages are spoken".

The keynote speaker, Miquel Strubell i Trueta, is Director of the Humanities Programme at the Universitat Oberta de Barcelona (Open University of Barcelona), a virtual university offering courses through the medium of Catalan to about 20,000 students. Strubell is a well-known writer and researcher on minority language issues and was one of the authors of Euromosaic (1996), a key EU-sponsored report on lesser-used languages in Europe.

Other speakers include Dr. Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidin, director of FIONTAR and a range of other Irish and international experts.

Knowledge of Irish is not necessary to attend the conference as translation will be provided.