Mr. Doncha O'Sullivan:

To go back on this for the Deputy, what was taking place here was a complete change of the promotion regulations. There were a lot of problems with the promotion regulations. When we came to do all the review work and build the new regulations, we built them on an objective basis on grounds that are linked to the skills one needs to be a good supervisor. I am not aware that anyone particularly felt the Irish language requirement was acting as a barrier to people going forward. One could construct scenarios where perhaps there may be people who might be dissuaded if their Irish was good enough to meet the basic standard but not the 50%. The reality is that there would probably be very few people in that mix. The point is that in a contemporary promotion competition process, the competency criteria we think are essential to general supervisory work are included, noting that there are some parts of the country where specialist skills will be needed. In general, one is looking to hire good supervisors based on the competencies that pertain to that sort of work. That is essentially the problem that was looking to be solved.