Mr. Alan Mulligan:

With regard to the training in Irish which students get, everybody has to pass Irish as part of the degree course. A lot of the training relates to practical matters such as dealing with road traffic, arrests and so on. We have full-time Irish teachers who work with the students. Feedback from the college suggests that those students who go to areas in which they are not using Irish find it harder to keep their skills. That is one of the new challenges we have to look at in the new strategy we are drawing up at the moment.

To come back to another point, it is important to state that we are one of the few public sector organisations that sets aside 10% of positions for people with Irish. We and the Public Appointments Service advertise this. We make sure it is advertised right across the country in both Gaeltacht areas and all other areas. Nobody is more disappointed than ourselves by the response we have had but that is the response. As I said earlier, we have attested 3,000 new Garda members since 2014. We would have thought that, with a fair wind, that would have given us 300 people through the Irish stream but the reality is that we got 55. I already gave some statistics as to the number of applications we got and I can certainly send in others going back through each competition over the years if the committee wishes. This outcome was not, however, the result of any lack of trying to make sure that people in those communities knew about the competition, that 10% of jobs were to be allocated to an Irish stream and that such applications would be fast-tracked. As I have said, nobody was more disappointed than ourselves. When we set out at the time, we really did expect a bigger response but that is the fact of the situation as it is.