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Some people believe that the official status of Irish in the European Union is tokenism and a waste of money. According to the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission, the EU institutions employ translators and interpreters for all 24 of the EU's official languages, and they spend around €1.1 billion on these language services each year; that's less than 1% of the total EU budget. The cost of the entire language services works out at about €2.20 per year for every EU citizen - or less than 5c a week - an even tinier fraction of which is spent on the Irish language. And Ireland pays into this translation fund, whether the money is spent on Irish or not. Moreover, since Irish became an official language of the EU in 2007, more Irish has been spoken in the European Parliament than Estonian or Maltese. In some years, more Irish has been spoken than Latvian - a language with over 2 million speakers - and even Danish, which has over 5 million speakers. Irish is a real, working language of the European Union.
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