Ms Deirdre Shanley:

The Department tries to support people to avail of all kinds of training and development and certainly would be very supportive of Irish language training. We do, from time to time, recruit in-house training also.

I wish to mention also that we have active conversational circles in our offices and these are informal networks where staff come together to engage in practising their Irish language skills, and that encourages them to avail of the more formal training.

That is a good way to get staff who are interested in the Irish language and may not have used it for some time to get back into it and start the formal training process.