Community council’s decision to scrap use of Welsh is ‘blow to the language’

Martin Shipton
The decision of a community council in a Welsh speaking area to hold meetings only in English has raised concerns among supporters of the Welsh language.
It has emerged that at the annual general meeting of Llanpumsaint Community Council in Carmarthenshire in May, councillors decided to cancel the simultaneous translation service at meetings.
The council minute reads: “Members of the public are welcome to come and listen to the meeting, but space will be limited. Usually, the meetings are held in both Welsh and English but as the council will have only one Welsh speaker now, it was agreed to suspend the translation services for the time being. This will be reviewed at the November meeting.”
Translation services
Since reading about the decision, local resident Phil Jones has written to Deryck Evans, the audit manager of Audit Wales stating: “The final nail has been hammered into the coffin of Welsh language democracy at community level in Llanpumsaint. Having just received the most recent edition of Llais y Llan/Village Voice, this is what was included by the Community Council: ‘…..Also, apart from County Councillor Davies, there will only be one Welsh speaker remaining on the Community Council. It was therefore agreed at the last meeting that the translation services would be suspended for the time being. Future meetings will be conducted in English until more Welsh speakers join the Council…..’
“There haven’t been Welsh Minutes available for years and now this.
“Does Audit Wales have a Welsh language policy? It would appear not. You are not a subcontracted auditor working on secondment to Wales Audit Office but an auditor who has served over two decades of time in Audit Wales and should know of various policies, strategies and initiatives proposed by the Senedd to safeguard and grow the Welsh language.
“Since 2006, and culminating in the 2017 release of Cymraeg 2050 – A million Welsh speakers by 2050, there have been numerous pieces of legislation introduced to safeguard the ancient Celtic tongue. You have no appreciation of the Welsh language as someone who is not a speaker of it and attempts to abide by the letter of the law and produce documents bilingually, even if it means using inferior AI methods to translate letters. This travesty of a community losing its Welsh council is due to Audit Wales not having a Welsh language policy.
“This significant weakness within the auditing process points to directors not doing what they are supposed to, which is to continually update policies and protocols as and when new legislation is introduced … Their negligence in positively influencing auditing protocols to protect the Welsh language has led to the demise of Welsh as the language of Llanpumsaint Community Council.
“Further evidence of Audit Wales lack of a Welsh language policy is illustrated by correspondence received by Samuel Kurtz MS from the Auditor General, Adrian Crompton, dated 31.10.2023: ‘When allocating audit work, insofar as is operationally possible, we allocate audits where Welsh is the first language to our Welsh speaking auditors. On occasions this may not be possible due to the need to manage workloads and to issues arising at audits. If there are particular issues arising at audit, for example, we may need to allocate the work to more experienced staff who may not be Welsh speakers.’
“That is not a policy but an ‘ad-hoc, if it suits us’ policy. There is no respect for the Welsh language within what should be Audit Wales. Remember including this paragraph in the October 2021 section 22 Report? ‘Point 57 – …. To do so would not just be contrary to law but would also mean that local taxpayers in substantially Welsh speaking areas (who will tend to be Welsh speakers) must accept inferior financial management and accountability.’
“And now the community has accounting processes that are Audit Wales compliant … but no Welsh language.”
Welsh Language Commissioner
A spokesperson for Audit Wales said: “Matters relating to how the council functions bilingually would be a matter for the Welsh Language Commissioner.”
Under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, community councils are not subject to Welsh Language Standards regulated by the Welsh Language Commissioner so far as their internal workings are concerned.
Responding to the decision of the community council to cease translation facilities, Siân Howys, deputy chair of Cymdeithas yr Iaith, responsible for overseeing campaigns, said: “This is another example of the need to regulate and place expectations on more bodies to provide services and work through the Welsh language. Town and community councils are an important part of our communities and are responsible for a wide range of services that people come into contact with every day.
“Welsh Language Standards need to be imposed on community councils and on Audit Wales, the statutory auditor of public bodies, as soon as possible. This could be done immediately and all parties standing in the Senedd election should commit to setting Standards in every possible domain if they are elected next May.”
A Carmarthenshire political source said: “There’s a trend in some Welsh-speaking areas for incomers from England or non-Welsh speakers to take charge of the lowest rungs of local government.”
Support our Nation today
For the price of a cup of coffee a month you can help us create an independent, not-for-profit, national news service for the people of Wales, by the people of Wales.
This is outrageous. People can by maw speak in Welsh in council meetings. It is up to the council how ut deaks with this, but it cannot rule out speaking in Welsh, and all documents inc minutes and accounts should be bilingual if not in Welsh alone. Tge Llanpumpsaint councillors are in any case showing themselves as people who consider themselves racially and linguistically superior to local people. Tge answer lies in local hands however. Make sure a cohort of local candidates who speak Welsh or are sympathetic to it should be waiting for any election or byelection.
So the colonists have overtaken Llanpumsaint now.
You wouldn’t say that if the ‘colonists’ were Syrians. How is Wales going to be independent if you want a fifth of the population to be treated as second class citizens?
This comment says so much more about you than it does anyone else
I know people from Nations similar to Syria who have integrated allot better into Welsh speaking communities allot better than many people from East of Offas Dyke to
East of Offas dyke and you’re still in Wales you idiot. Unless you want to give Flintshire, Wrexham and much of Powys over to England.
Ok then East of the Border then you stupid clown.
Then why not go all the way and include the lost lands of Western Herefordshire and Shropshire plus the Western Bank of the Severn as far as Gloucester.
Last time I checked Syria wasn’t trying to colonise Wales, unlike our partner in this union of equals
Mae’n amlwg bod y rhan fwyaf o aelodau Cyngor Cymuned Llanpumsaint ddim yn sylweddoli nad oes angen offer cyfieithu ar y cynghorwyr sy’n medru’r Gymraeg. Yn hytrach y rhai sydd ddim yn siarad yr iaith sydd angen cyfieithydd. Rwy’n awgrymu bod y rhai sy’n siarad Cymraeg yn parhau i wneud hynny ym mhresenoldeb neu yn absenoldeb cyfieithydd. Dyna wnes i yn ystod fy amser fel Cynghorydd Sir a Chymuned (28 mlynedd) ac yn ystod fy nghyfnod yn aelod o Awdurdod Heddlu Dyfed-Powys. O ganlyniad, roedd y di-gymraeg ar y pwyllgorau yn mynnu cael cyfieithydd yn o sydyn.
Ron i am ddweud union yr un peth. Dim y Cymry Cymraeg sydd angen cyfieithydd.
Is this an accurate translation: Here is the English translation of your Welsh text: — **”It is clear that most members of Llanpumsaint Community Council do not realise that translation equipment is not needed for councillors who speak Welsh. Rather, it is those who do not speak the language who need a translator. I suggest that those who speak Welsh continue to do so in the presence or absence of a translator. That is what I did during my time as a County and Community Councillor (28 years) and during my time as a member of the Dyfed-Powys Police Authority.… Read more »
Da iawn,Rwy’n cydfynd a chi
I would literally just have ignored you.
Cywylyddus bod y cyngor ddim yn gweld y gwerth yn y iaith Cymraeg.
I agree with Cymdeithas, make it law that they have to do it – it’s the only language these people will understand.
It appears the only language they understand is English
This is the cost of unmitigated in-migration and lack of cultural integration. Llanpumsaint would probably not have heard a word of English in its lanes 50 years ago. Live there a year and put yourself up for election. Reduce our fair lands to your insipid, globally-despised monoculture. Gwarth!
You may well have a point. I recall being in a pub in a village very close to Llanpumsaint, one Saturday evening back in the 1970s. Virtually all the conversations taking place were in the Welsh language. On the other hand, something curious chanced to happen. A small TV on a shelf above the bar was switched on – inevitably, in those days, tuned to an English language channel – and playing quietly, ignored by everyone. Until the news came on, and one leading item was an interview with the late Enoch Powell. When people twigged that he was on,… Read more »
Enoch Powell had a competent grasp of Welsh and was known to speak it on occasion. Still a raging racist though.
Did he? I’d no idea; possibly his English west midland twang meant that I never conceived the possibility! Still, he was intellectually formidable, and maybe he’d taken account of the antecedents of his surname.
But obviously not enough to take up calling himself ‘Enoch ap Hywel’, which would have made that immediately apparent.
There’s clips of him online speaking Welsh, which was a revelation to me also.
Yes, there is footage on Youtube of Enoch Powell being interviewed in Cymraeg by a BBC journalist. He must have learned Cymraeg out of a literary book, because he spoke in a literary register, not in a normal ‘spoken’ Cymraeg register. Shame he was such a racist.
Cheers – I’ll do a search for that. Whatever his dubious politics – I always thought that his political stance was shaped more by nostalgia for mid-Victorian British imperialist ideology than anything else – he was formidably intelligent. I could imagine him learning Welsh from books alone, simply for the challenge of doing so.
I actually sympathise. There’s probably very little money in the budget and they have to be careful about where every penny is spent. They probably thought they would be doing people a favour if they spent the money in the community instead. If people are so desperately concerned that there HAS to be a Welsh language version of the minutes taken and a translator in hand so that members of the community can speak in either English or Welsh at meetings, then why doesn’t a Welsh-speaking member of the community join the committee for this purpose? What? No volunteers? Everyone… Read more »
Because the Welsh speakers have jobs, the councillors are retired immigrants from across the bridge
I suspect that there’s something to that. A community councillor’s role may not be especially onerous given such councils’ limited powers, but it can be significant and people in a job may well think twice before making the commitment. Whereas for someone fit, active, not long retired and with time to spare, the role may be appealing. Another factor which I’ve noticed is the reluctance, in smaller communities, of people to offer themselves in this sort of role for fear that neighbours whom they’ve known since childhood think that they’re somehow ‘getting above themselves’: the ‘just who does she think… Read more »
‘I actually sympathise. There’s probably very little money in the budget and they have to be careful about where every penny is spent.’
Fifty years ago I was for some years clerk to a community council in north Radnorshire. Your post calls to mind my sense at the time that the councillors used to demonstrate a real and abiding fear that if they committed to some significant local expenditure on a new amenity, they might arouse the wrath of their neighbours if that resulted in an increase to the rates bill!
Oh dear. For every one respectful in-migrant, we get ten of you. Yma o Hyd. Er gwaethaf pawb a phopeth.
This is what you will get if Reform takes over Wales. Beware.
Whoever has made this decision has an obvious agenda. Cost is always the excuse. Can you imagine if a community council in Gwynedd announcing they were scrapping their English translation. Their would be outrage with the usual attacks made towards nationalism and nationalists. This is a retrograde step to the bad old days of the Welsh Not. Welsh and English equal status lol. Yeah sure. What next on their to-do agenda? Replacing Llanpumpsaint, although even that is a corruption of the original. Using the English-only name. Church/dwelling of the five saints? It’s a slow drip drip undermining of the Welsh… Read more »
Always recall saying a few words in Welsh (which I then repeated in English) at a public meeting several years back. One Councillor approached me after the meeting and said “there’s no need for that in this day and age”. When I responded, this person came back with the immortal line that “hearing Welsh upsets some people”. Rest assured, there’s plenty of folk out there with these inward-looking opinions, and they’ll certainly multiply as Farage’s Anglo Army marches assuredly across our land.
Not all incomers are anti-Welsh language. Some ate more passionate about it than the natives.
Very true. However, in my experience, the majority are at best ambivalent and at worst, take grevious offence at hearing it. The few that have embraced it, have my respect.
What you are saying is right.However from my own experiences Interacting with Incomers on the subject of The Welsh Language has not mostly been positive.
That is wrong, common. Sense needs to prevail
If they are Welsh speaking let them speak Welsh as long as it does not disadvantage English only speaking residents,
Welsh language rules state both languages have to be treated equally. Seems it seems this equality is very selective
Can you name me an instance of anyone in Cymru being refused a service in the English Language dating back from The Industrial Revolution!
I’m not sure that there are really strong grounds to object to this decision, given that if enough folk living in the community council area find it objectionable, they’re perfectly free, at the next opportunity, to identify and to elect different folk to serve as councillors who are committed to reverse the decision in question.
I think that you would find that most of the electorate in that area are now in-migrants or immediate descendants. The demographic shift started by mid 60’s with most of the influx being Anglophonic and disinterested or downright hostile to use of the Welsh language. Of course there are real exceptions but obviously not enough to out weigh the negative impacts. Contrast that shift with Carmarthen town, quite anglicised in the 60’s, now a place with a healthy level of Welsh language usage. Still it looks bad when Cefn Gwlad becomes an unwelcoming place for users of the language.
You could be right. I remember, some years back, hearing a broadcast in which Beti George recalled being invited to some celebration back in Cwm Teifi where she’d grown up; I think it was some anniversary relating to the school at Coed y Bryn near Llandysul which she’d attended in her young days and where the children’s author T. Llew Jones had once been head teacher. She’d been struck by the fact that the main organizers of the event – held, if I remember rightly, in some hostelry in Newcastle Emlyn – were all speaking English and appeared to be… Read more »
Some of Beti George’s programmes about the history of life in various communities gave much insight into how the nature of in-migration has changed and the damage done in turn to the receiving communities. I recall some people telling her how evacuees came to live in the Teifi valley and surrounding area with no knowledge of Welsh and little appreciation of rural life yet by the end of WW2 they were integrating rapidly including the ability to converse in Welsh. Even POW’s had acquired Welsh and elected not to leave when free to do so. My guess is the “rot”… Read more »
Certainly the ‘rot’ to which you allude wasn’t noticeable in Lampeter during my time there – 1964-69. Back then the local community was strongly Welsh-speaking, and you normatively heard more Welsh than English spoken in shops and in streets.
So much so that without any organized and systematic intention to learn – I was already having to familiarize myself with two new languages as part of my degree course! – I quickly picked up a few basic Welsh phrases, simply as a result of listening to the amount of Welsh spoken around me day by day.
Dim ond un siaradwr yn y cyngor, so beth sy’n problem? Os ydych chi’n moyn mwy Cymraeg yn y cwrdd, mae angen mwy siaradwyr yn y cwrdd onid e? Yn seml.
I remember when they used the name of Five Saints to describe the Horse Riding Center.It was visible on a Brown Tourist Sign.
Including this article is this going to suggest that Llanpumsaint and other similar communities are now becoming a Celtic version of West Bank Settlements.
Disgraceful- this community council is failing to heed the future generation(well being) act at the very least. How many welsh speakers are discouraged from being a community councillor when community councils demote the welsh language as not important.
Does na ond un ateb i hyn, a hyny ydy i Gymru Cymraeg yr ardal sefyll fel Cynghorwyr Cymuned ac i ddefnyddio yr iaith.
The last paragraph in this article is the most significant one. It’s certainly a pattern repeated over many parts of this country.