Dr. Margaret Fitzgerald:

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach. In our national office for social inclusion, our remit includes those who are socially marginalised or excluded from mainstream society. This includes groups such as Travellers, Roma, people in direct provision, homeless people, people affected by addiction and irregular migrants. In the course of our work during the Covid pandemic, we saw how much Covid outbreaks were affecting those who are most excluded and who are, as I used to say, not necessarily watching the news on RTÉ at night or reading the mainstream media. When the roll-out of the vaccination campaign started, we were acutely aware that we needed to think outside the box. I wrote a paper with my colleagues in mid-2021 highlighting how we needed to reach out to vulnerable migrants. Even though we knew there was a focus on giving people access to vaccination based on medical vulnerability in line with the advice of the national immunisation advisory committee, NIAC, we knew that not everyone in society could get access easily and that a pathway needed to be opened for several of these groups. Access issues could relate to language, physical distance, the lack of a car, distrust in society or distrust in the vaccination message. Through our research and ongoing work, we could see that the level of uptake of vaccination among some communities in Ireland, particularly multi-ethnic communities, was very low even as their cohorts were offered vaccination. That was the main driver of the production of these videos.

The first indication that we needed to do something different was that pregnant women were very hesitant to take up vaccination. Our colleagues on the ground, and GPs in particular, who were already working with Translate Ireland, an organisation that started up after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, suggested that we produce video material in the languages of certain communities, especially the languages of eastern Europeans, Brazilians and people coming from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, to be delivered by healthcare workers from their own countries so that they could hear the voices of their own communities. We felt that written material did not suit these communities and that they had to be given something they could see and hear in a video or multimedia format, that is, something that could be shared on WhatsApp. They were our main motivations.

The languages we initially picked were Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Romanian and Urdu. We then moved on to Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian, Somali, Czech and Slovak. Ukrainian was added latterly to meet the needs of the Ukrainian community that has just arrived. We picked the top 11 languages based on the numbers of people we had in the community and the numbers of people in direct provision, another group that was greatly affected by the Covid pandemic. We picked a mixture. Obviously, not all ethnic minorities are excluded socially but many work in low-paid industries. We picked the languages based on the communities, their context and the hesitancy and lack of access that we could see from our statistics. English was picked as an audit tool to make sure we knew that what we were translating was correct. That is why we did not look at doing one for the Irish-speaking community at that point.