Ms Deirdre Shanley:

The Department's corporate services unit is the unit that has overall responsibility for co-ordinating, monitoring and reporting on the implementation of the Department's obligations under the Official Languages Act and the Irish language scheme. The section, which is headed by a principal officer, Mr. Joe McMahon, who is present, acts as a liaison with the office of An Coimisinéir Teanga and with the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, on the implementation of our responsibilities. The section provides reports on an ongoing basis to the management board and any other information that is required regarding the implementation of our commitments and meeting our obligations. The Department reports on the delivery of services through Irish and the implementation of our scheme in our annual report.

Our relationship would involve regular contact with the office of An Coimisinéir Teanga, and it carried out a review in March 2017 of the implementation of the first year of the Department's language scheme. That review was very favourable to the Department overall in terms of the wide range of services that we provide, the fact that we provide all our scheme applications in Irish, and that we have a facility for responding to customers in Irish. The Deputy asked about when a customer writes to the Department in Irish by way of an email or letter. It is the policy of the Department to respond in Irish to any correspondence in Irish received from customers.

We also have a facility on our IT system that a customer can indicate their language preference. If a customer tells us that they want to be corresponded with through Irish, we can arrange that anything that goes out to that customer from the Department goes out in Irish. This will happen for any customer who has informed us of that and we do that in a very proactive way. If we receive something from a customer through Irish, we will also ensure that indicator is there and that we respond to that in Irish.

In terms of HEOs, and if the committee wants additional detail, my colleague, Mr. O'Leary, can respond, there is no direct or open recruitment at a central level to the HEO grade.

It is not Irish or English related. There is no panel that exists. That is an agreement that is in place with the unions and is not related to the Irish language but to HEOs in general. Would Mr. O'Leary like to comment on this?