Mr. Alan Mulligan:

Members are probably aware that all Garda trainees in the training college undergo Irish training, particularly to equip them to deal with operational and traffic issues, as well as making arrests etc. That is done, it is part of the degree programme and it has to be passed.

One of the things we homed in on is that, as the Commissioner mentioned earlier, we were disappointed with the results and the numbers we got in over the last five to six years under the Irish stream of the competition we run with the Public Appointments Service. To put that into perspective for members, we have brought in and attested 3,000 new gardaí in that period and we have only got 55 trainees in the Irish language stream. The numbers applying have been disappointing. For example, the last time we ran the competition in 2019 we got 132 applications to the Irish language stream. We will be running a competition later this year and we are talking to our partners in the Public Appointments Service to see if there are reasons for this and why is it happening. My understanding from talking to the Public Appointments Service is that it has had those issues with other competitions as well. One of the things that was mentioned is that there is a huge demand for many of the people who have good language skills so we are competing for that in the marketplace.

We will look at it again and as the Commissioner said, we will particularly target the new Garda Reserve competition when we run it. We have done a lot of research on that and the Garda Reserve is a good way to get to the hard-to-get communities. We will also advertise that differently. While we will announce nationally, rather than just having a national competition, we will recruit locally and we will go into the communities themselves. I hope there will be a lot of interest from people. There is a great tradition of volunteerism in Ireland. We hope that when we target Gaeltacht areas we will get a big interest. That will be a first and an important step.

On training, if we are not getting trainees in we have to look at what else we can do. One of the areas we have targeted is that of our governance structures because we have an opportunity coming out of Covid to tackle this and to get it moving as we go forward. One of the things we have done is we have asked and paid Gaelchultúr to devise courses for us, which it is doing. The first step will be to bring our people who are at level 2 up to level 3. We have also asked that when we achieve that we will bring them from level 3 up to level 4. Those courses will be online. We are working with the Garda College on it to make it easier for our people to do the courses. It will be a combination of people doing it online and other situations we will design in which we bring people together. For the last two years, one of the most popular initiatives we had on Irish were Gaeltacht trips. We used to have three or four every year and they were always very popular and oversubscribed. We went to Gaeltacht areas in Waterford, Kerry and Donegal. Last year and so far this year, because of Covid we have not been able to do that, unfortunately, but we intend on getting that out again.

We are devising a new strategy as well. As I said, this is a chance for us to start again and to try to get these numbers up, particularly in areas such as Donegal and in parts of Mayo, to make sure we can provide those services in Irish. Between governance, recruitment, the training programmes and some of the other initiatives the Commissioner mentioned, it is an opportunity for a fresh start. We are determined to do what we need to do.

The allowance was mentioned earlier. This was done away with in 2012 after the downturn in the economy when different allowances across different sectors, including An Garda Síochána, were looked at. It used to be 7.5% of salary but that is no longer there for anybody new. Our officers who already had it did not lose it but any new gardaí we have put in do not get that allowance.