Mr. Paul Fay:

I will clarify my earlier remarks. The groups I was talking about were the monitoring group convened under the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht for the five year action plan. I was not referring to the early years forum, which is yet another structure so that monitoring group and that early years focused monitoring group are actually new structures directed at that five year action plan under the 20 year Irish language strategy. I apologise if there was confusion about that. The strategy for that monitoring group was launched in Killarney three weeks ago and we had our first meeting on the day of the launch. The early years group will be meeting for the first time before Christmas.

The Senator is right that when Deputy Zappone became Minister, she established an early years forum to allow her to communicate with the whole early years sector and there are two Irish language groups on that. Several subgroups were set up to tease out issues in greater details and Irish was one of them and we have some detail on what came out of that group. It probably met between four and six times, as did the other subgroups. I was not actually involved with it.

We can talk the committee through the recommendations that came out but I was talking about having had meetings with Údarás na Gaeltachta, Foras na Gaeilge and all of the rest of them earlier and how there was a little bit of confusion and inconsistency around what was being asked for coming out of it. That came up in the forum subgroup and it was a very good place to tease out issues but ultimately its best benefit was that officials in my area were talking to our colleagues in the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht about the five year action plan, which became the main vehicle. The real benefit of having had the conversations in the early years forum setting was to inform our conversations around that. It is given its ultimate expression in the five year action plan and the 14 specific early years actions that are contained in the language transmission by the family section.