Ms Marguerite Bolger:

I actually went back and looked at the Health and Safety Act because the most common area where the notion of the entitlement to have something displayed in the workplace and the most important one, or the one with most meaning, is the safety statement. Quite a lot of issues have arisen in that regard over the years, according as the number of non-Irish people in the workplace has increased, in terms of displaying the safety statement in a language that is reasonably capable of being understood. That is accepted as a good thing. I will not go so far as to say I definitively commit to it not existing in any of the myriad amounts of legislation that exist, but I have never come across a situation where any statement in the workplace has to be displayed in English and in the first language. To impose that on employers, for starters, would be doing something that is quite different in terms of existing obligations in the workplace. In terms of the respect that should be afforded to the first language where somebody requests something to be furnished to them as Gaeilge, consideration should perhaps be given to that. That may be a wider issue in terms of the language, but to put what is quite a radical issue around the recognition of the language and enforcing that through employment law, that is a very real challenge to a small employer, for example, and it is not something that is to the forefront of the concerns of most atypical, vulnerable employees.