Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 19 November 2019

Joint Standing Committee on the Irish Language, the Gaeltacht and the Islands

An Ghaeilge agus Seirbhísí Dátheangacha: An tSeirbhís um Cheapacháin Phoiblí

Ms Shirley Comerford:

I will take the question on training first because it is fairly straightforward to answer. We currently have six people in training and we have already trained three. By the end of it, when these people are trained, we should have 15 people on staff who can provide services.

The Deputy's other question related to the applicant pool and how we attract Irish speakers. A lot of work is being done with the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht with regard to selling careers in the public service to Irish speakers. I understand that there has been an increase resulting from work on CAO points with regard to the Irish language. The Department is also sponsoring things like masters level qualifications. These are also funded by a centre of excellence for EU careers. There are many interventions at various stages in second and third level institutions to sell the public service as an attractive career and, as the Deputy has mentioned, to increase the pool of applicants who speak Irish.

As I said in my opening statement, the numbers are very stark. Almost 519,000 applicants have registered on publicjobs.ie, of which more than 4,000 have indicated that they want to conduct their business with us through Irish. It is quite a small pool. We are aware that there is likely to be pent-up demand. It is a matter of participating and partnering with Departments when they are rolling out initiatives, particularly the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, for obvious reasons. We are quite dynamic in making sure that, when we are selling roles on publicjobs.ie, our services are provided through Irish and that it is as easy as possible for Irish speakers to conduct their business with us through Irish. We welcome such communication. We go to great lengths to make sure that we do that. Promoting that is very important.

On the Deputy's earlier point about panels where a person must specify a preference for English or Irish and people opting for the English stream, we will find out over the next six months or so whether having specific Irish-only competitions will increase the applicant pool. These are a number of things we are thinking about with regard to increasing the candidate pool and promoting engagement with the Public Appointments Service through Irish.

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