Mr. Padraig McMahon:

That is a fact. Generally speaking, people are not charged. There are courses within the Civil Service for which they can apply. It is easy to get on them. Managers will help staff to get on them. If people want to develop a professional level of Irish, they can take a course at masters level. Such courses are subject to the refund of fees arrangement, which is not as straightforward. We are going to examine this matter. We will discuss it with the training and development side of the office. It seems that many people are interested. There are two ways we can make the most of this. First, we can bring staff up to a level at which they can do their jobs through Irish. That is quite a high bar. Second, we are interested in bringing more staff up to a level at which they can deal with people through Irish in a conversational way. We have discovered that many people say they are interested, but then life gets in the way. Perhaps that is why we do not get the numbers. We are looking into this to see how we can make it a little more relevant and whether there is something we can do to encourage people. We got these statistics relatively recently. We are going to use them. We were surprised to learn that so many people are interested. We are going to put something in place.