Ms Shirley Comerford:

It would probably be useful if I again refer to that piece about what we do in catering for candidates. It was never a requirement that one had to have Irish, as was previously said. It was English or Irish or another language. In terms of the status piece, we believe it gives Irish a status that would perhaps appeal to a broader candidate pool. That is the first piece I wish to speak on.

So that people understand from a process perspective, candidates can apply through the general stream as well as the Irish stream. They can compete in both. From that perspective, we hope that we will see – I note we are only testing this – a situation where candidates will go for both streams who may not have the level of fluency that is required to come through the Irish stream but will come through the general stream and have a level of proficiency in Irish that they can enhance through their training and the various schemes the Garda is putting in place.

We are very committed in the Public Appointments Service to the running of Irish competitions. When we run Irish streams, they can be quite focused as a campaign and allow us to focus our marketing and outreach efforts. We know from the various Irish competitions that we run that when we run Irish streams, we attract candidates who have a good command of the language. We also believe that when Irish speakers compete through the Irish competitions, they statistically do better than others insofar as the candidate pool is bit smaller.

It is a challenge in terms of providing all public services through Irish. We are all very aware of the commitments under the official languages legislation. From the Public Appointments Service's perspective, we look forward to working on the national advisory committee that is being set up to look at strategies that can be put in place to help all public servants and public services to reach their commitments to provide their services through Irish by 2030.

It is quite right in regard to what comes through from the Irish stream. We have seen a lot of attrition where people believe their proficiency is at a fluency level that it is not. The numbers that come through are very small. It is fair to say that unless some action was taken, we were not going to get anywhere with this. We hope that through the combined efforts of what we are doing and what is happening in the Garda, we will see some traction and improvements.

I refer to Yvonne Cooke’s point on reaching out to young potential public and civil servants. We recently launched our public jobs schools kit, which is a pick-up-and-teach resource for transition year teachers to go through with their classes in order to give them an introduction to the public service and the Civil Service and plant that seed for them to consider pursuing careers across the public service. These resources that were recently launched are available in both English and Irish. Efforts are being made. It is fair to say that we are not going to achieve those targets by focusing on the recruitment element alone. As the members will know, more than I do, that there are a multitude of challenges facing us in driving up our participation rates of fluent Irish speakers in public sector organisations.