Irish Sign Language Act 2017
The Irish Sign Language Act 2017 is an Act of the Oireachtas which gives Irish Sign Language official legal status.
Background
Broadly, before the bill was passed there were large swathes of public services that were inaccessible to deaf people.In 2015, it was noted by Mental Health Reform that unless a user of mental health services books an interpreter in advance, there is no way to communicate this in advance.
In 2017, the Citizens Information Board published a report criticising a lack of interpreters in public organisations as undermining of the self-worth of deaf people and quite possibly clinically dangerous in a medical context due to the possibility of a misunderstanding leading to significant clinical risk.
In 2020, primary education was criticised as extremely exclusionary and inaccessible to deaf children.
The campaign for Irish Sign Language to gain legal recognition took 35 years from the start of the campaign to commencement.