Ms Shirley Comerford:

With regard to the Deputy's point, it is not necessarily the case that those 4,000 are the only people with sufficient proficiency in Irish to conduct their day-to-day work through the language or to apply for a role.

These are the people who are interested in applying for roles in the public service.

I can speak about an example of what we have seen in this regard. In the Garda trainee recruitment campaigns, which we have been running annually for the past six years, one of the requirements is that candidates have proven proficiency in two languages, one of which must be either English or Irish. In cases where the candidates do not meet this requirement, the regulation allows us to undertake assessments that prove their competency in the Irish language. We have designed tests to ensure that the candidates' language proficiency is at the appropriate level. At the time of application, candidates have two options. They can apply for the general stream, the Irish language stream, or both. They are then permitted to sit stage 1, the online tests, and stage 2, and their scores at these stages are used for both streams. If they are successful at these stages, they are then called forward to stage 3. This consists of a competency-based interview in each language. Candidates then have the choice to proceed with one or both streams. If they are successful at interview, they are then forwarded to Garda headquarters for further processing. The statistics for these competitions, which the members will have seen in my submission, show the number of applicants for the Irish language stream of the Garda competition who drop out between submitting an application and completing the tests. It has been our experience that many candidates tick the box to indicate they wish to apply for the Irish language stream, but when we make contact with them, they do not have fluency or do not wish to proceed with that stream of the competition.

This problem is not unique to Irish language campaigns. We have experience of candidates ticking boxes to say that they meet other criteria only for us to realise that they do not as we move through the processes. That is what we are trying to do with the model of running competitions specifically for Irish-speaking candidates. This will allow us to see whether there is a correlation between dropout rates and application rates and how effective our awareness campaigns and advertising have been. We may then be able to draw some conclusions from our findings.