Mr. David Cagney:

OneLearning, the new Irish Civil Service Learning and Development Centre function, is promoting the opportunity for civil servants to learn Irish. This is not necessarily to do with their career etc. although it clearly would help, but it is to encourage them to speak Irish. The indications are that the take-up of that opportunity over recent years is increasing. This would seem to suggest to us that there is a desire on the part of civil servants across the board to speak the language. One of the key things that we need to do in our strategy is to discover how to leverage that. One of the challenges that we have, as I set out in the statement, is that there is a nervousness on the part of the civil servants who have a fluency in Irish that if they put their hand up and ask for that to be recognised, they end up in a situation where they become the go-to person for every Irish language query in a Department. If that image is very much to the fore it will not encourage people to come forward so we have to break down that particular culture also. The fact that take-up is occurring in OneLearning, notwithstanding that concern, is a pretty positive situation.