Mr. John McKeon:

On the Irish language, tá náire orm nach bhfuil an Ghaeilge á labhairt fós agam. Having said that, we provide translation facilities for people who want to conduct their affairs through Irish where the officer with whom they are dealing is not a strong Irish speaker, and we will engage people from the Irish translation services to sit in and so on. We have just completed an engagement and innovation project with our staff. We have staff working on engagement and innovation projects at a staff level throughout the Department. They have just carried out a survey to try to strengthen our response in Irish and 900 staff identified themselves as people who are more than competent and capable of dealing with clients entirely through Irish, so that is something we will follow up on.

With regard to the oral hearings and in-person versus remote hearings, we fully take on board the Vice Chairman's concerns that not everybody is capable or competent or, even if they were, would want to conduct their affairs through a video link or whatever, and we will always facilitate people with in-person hearings. Other companies and businesses talk about “digital by design” or “digital by default”. Generally, the line we use in the Department - it is not just a stock phrase - is “digital by desire”, meaning people should use digital when they want to but they should always have access to post, telephone and in-person communications, and we are trying to maintain that ethos within the Department.

As for timelines, the chief appeals officer will comment in a moment. There is always a balance between doing things remotely and otherwise. One way the remote hearings have helped is that we have been able to get more appeals completed more quickly, which is to the benefit of most people, and that is always a balance.

On the ICT systems, the tender is out at the moment and we expect a response imminently. It will depend on the tender response, but my experience tends to suggest that once we appoint a supplier, it will take between nine and 12 months, although we will see when we get the responses from the suppliers.

On the other timelines we were talking about in the draft regulations, such as extending the timeframe from three weeks to 60 days for somebody to make an appeal and up to 180 days, and giving the Department three weeks to revert and so on, we would hope that, if the regulations are approved by the Minister, we should be able to set up those kinds of operational procedures in about a three-month period. There will be a fair bit of pressure on the Department. My main concern about the changes in the appeals process and regulations has come not from the appeals office but from departmental staff having to respond within three weeks and asking how they can do that, but I am reasonably confident we can address those issues within a three- to four-month period once the regulations have been signed.