Mr. David Cagney:

The Senator has raised a wider question and it is directly relevant to the specific question she has asked. We absolutely accept that the pool coming through is far too low, which is essentially our main challenge. It is not that there is no opportunities as there clearly are. From a wider Civil Service point of view we need to be speaking to potential aspirants to Civil Service careers at the decision points in their journey. Clearly, that is people who are coming up to do their leaving certificate and to qualify in college. Even from the point of view of recruiting the kind of skills that the Civil Service is going to need, we need to be targeting those cadres anyway at those particular points in their decision-making process. That also affords us the opportunity in the context of what career opportunities may be available to indicate what those possibilities in Irish language posts are or posts in which we would welcome people who can converse in the Irish language. That will be part of a strategy we will be deploying in consultation with the Public Appointment Service which is in turn part of the Civil Service ten-year renewal plan.

I cannot speak specifically for what is happening in education but my colleague, Dr. Mac Cormaic can. My understanding is that there is some thinking within the educational system about aligning the teaching of Irish with the accepted standardisation for the speaking of foreign languages which would seem to us to make a lot of sense in terms of our ability to recruit people with that level of proficiency to the Civil Service. This is assuming, of course, that we can convince people as we speak to them at the decision points in their careers about those opportunities.