removed all funding for the language, banned Irish language street names, censored textbooks and threatened the imprisonment of speakers and school founders. But my community is proud, determined and talented; we have never waited on permission to assert our rights or our ancient cultural identity. This year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of our first Irish medium Primary School, Bunscoil Phobal Feirste. The founders of that school faced incredible resistance from the British state and from the Education Department, and were threatened with imprisonment. It would take that school until 1984 to be recognised as an official school. Today, we have over 30 Irish Medium Schools, with over 7,000 pupils, making it the fastest growing education sector in the state. Following a 30 year conflict, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. There was genuine hope that language would be ‘brought in from the cold'. A new era of equality was promised for the Irish language and specific and strong commitments were given regarding the promotion and protection of the language particularly in education. Yet the facts speak for themselves. The GFA provided a statutory duty on the Department of Education to "encourage and facilitate" the growth of the Irish-medium sector. Today, around 60% of our schools are based in temporary accommodation, with many heavily oversubscribed with no coherent strategy to address the demand from the statutory bodies. There is still no provision for linguistically appropriate special needs support in Irish-medium schools. The GFA promised to remove restrictions which discouraged the maintenance and development of the language. Instead, we have faced continued denigration by public representatives, including government Ministers, who have withdrawn funding from Irish language schemes and painted our demand for rights as a demand for "preferential treatment". I would like to be standing in front of you telling you that the peace process was a catalyst in the growth of the Irish language. Unfortunately, the collapse of our government - and its 3 year suspension from 2017 - was a direct consequence of the refusal of both the British government and the NI Executive to honour its legal obligations to provide formal recognition to the Irish language. The GFA promised an Irish Language Act. This was reaffirmed at the St Andrew's Agreement in 2006 and the New Decade, New Approach agreement in 2020. There is no Irish Language Act today. Although political parties and the British government try to assure us that such legislation is pending, 16 years of missed deadlines, unfulfilled commitments and false dawns tell us otherwise. Our community is justifiably sceptical of the British Government and the political institution's ability to deliver on language rights. The British Government ratified the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional and Minority languages in 2001. In each and every monitoring report from the Council's Committee of Experts, COMEX have been consistently critical of the British Government for their lack of compliance on the core components of the Charter. UN oversight bodies have been equally critical of their approach to language rights. We place little value on formal commitments; we value action.