Mr. Peter Finnegan:

Monday and Friday, yes. They are the obvious ones. People are just too busy on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I know that from my own experience in trying to pursue language courses. We will look at that and try to come up with some suitable times for people.

On the captions ar an teilifís, I undertook to do that at the last meeting. We have installed the technology to facilitate the captioning. The second stage of the process is the recruitment of interpreters. We have two new interpreters starting in September. They will be able to translate material on a dynamic basis, so that captions are up to date. They will be working in the broadcasting unit. The issue at present is a health and safety issue in the broadcasting unit because of the confined space there. As soon as we get the green light from a health and safety point of view, we will be able to commence the captioning service. I hope, if things go well in terms of the public health situation, we will be starting the captioning service in the autumn.

On the arrears of the Act, the Deputy had various questions, and perhaps I should talk in that context about the staffing numbers in rannóg an aistriúcháin. We currently have 25 people. Three years ago, we had 24 people. To illustrate the extent of the challenge, over the past three years, we have run eight separate competitions to recruit staff in rannóg an aistriúcháin. Our net increase after all of that effort was one person. There is a big challenge in terms of recruiting people with the high standard of technical knowledge that can translate Acts.

We did our analysis of the Acts and we brought in PricewaterhouseCoopers, which I spoke about during my last appearance. Based on the metrics PricewaterhouseCoopers collected, its estimate was that rannóg needed 39 people to keep up with the current workload and to tackle the arrears on hand. We are well off that. Three years in and eight recruitment competitions later, we are still 14 people or 50% off our targeted numbers in rannóg.

One of the big issues that is beginning to affect us is the establishment of the EU translation unit in Grange, County Meath. That was really brought home to me when I looked at the figures. Our entry grade is aistritheoir grád 3. I rith Aibreán 2018, we had 48 duine who applied for the roles that were available. In our most recent competition for aistritheoir, we had seven people. The difficulty we have at present is that we cannot match the terms and conditions of the EU institutions. There are very attractive salary levels for people going to work in the EU institutions. That is having a big impact on our recruitment.

What we have done is we have approached the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform about the salary scales. This week, we got sanction to start people higher up on the scale. What we can do is we can start them on the fifth point of the scale, which will be an increase of approximately €10,000 in the starting salary for somebody coming in at aistritheoir grád 3. It is hoped that will help alleviate the problem somewhat. Going forward, the recruitment will be a big challenge for us. There is nothing we can do around that in the short term.

In terms of the progress of the Acts, the first year and a half of rannóg 2024 was about putting in place the foundations for tackling the arrears difficulties. We did significant analysis. We put in place an administrative team in rannóg an aistriúcháin. We put in place the project management team. We are now beginning to progress through the Acts. We are doing it at a slower pace than any of us would have wished. It will be a big challenge to reach the target we have set ourselves by 2024. We have to look to see how the recruitment thing plays out. If we can manage to recruit additional people by virtue of the higher salary rate, that will be an enormous assistance to us. We will have a better idea of that in about a year's time when we go back out to the market with higher salary levels. At that point it is possible to make a definitive assessment on how close we will come or how far off the 511 we will be, but it will be a big challenge. There is no doubt about that.