Four Dublin City University (DCU) students have reached the international final of the United Nations (UN) global sustainable development goals public policy innovation challenge, which will take place in Beijing next month.
The Irish team of four is one of 15 sets of finalists selected from more than 1,500 applicants across 55 countries around the world.
Lucas Spicer, Simon Madden, Wojciech Karatysz and Simon Standa will travel fully funded to Renmin University in Beijing to present their policy aimed at promoting Irish language and culture in Irish society.
“Our policy proposal is designed to strengthen everyday use of Irish, and so in our policy we did a three-year activation pilot, and then maybe scaling nationally after,” said Spicer.
RM Block
The UN-led programme started last year and is a global competition aimed at proposing policy solutions in line with the UN sustainable development goals. This year’s theme was the protection of cultural diversity.
In the policy proposal the team submitted as part of their application, they included ideas such as grants for multicultural projects and a digital learning hub.
“One new policy would be for providing grants for multicultural projects that would be done in Irish, so that’ll be like TV shows and film, but specifically through multicultural lenses,” said Karatysz.
They mentioned that only 8 per cent of people who can speak Irish actually use it in their daily lives, including in Gaeltacht areas.
“Another policy that we propose is to develop a digital language-learning hub that utilises AI to help users learn AI themselves as well and also support multiple different Irish dialects within AI”, Karatysz said.
The finalists were proud to mention they felt their project had more weight because the group members weren’t all fully Irish.
“Myself, I’m half-French,” said Spicer. “Simon [Standa] is Polish, Wojciech is Polish and Simon [Madden] is Irish”.
On Thursday, the office of President Catherine Connolly wrote to the group to extend her support for their representation of the Irish language on the global stage.
“The value of preserving and promoting the Irish language cannot be overemphasised, and your work in proposing public policy solutions to foster the everyday use of Irish through community, public service and digital supports is worthy of the highest praise,” said the letter.
The final of the international policy proposal competition will take place on the week starting on July 20th.
