Mr. Andrew Geary:

The same thing has happened to Calum this year. Calum has gone into mainstream secondary school. Quite often deaf students can find leaving the deaf environment going into a mainstream environment very intimidating and, therefore, unfortunately, dropout rates may be higher. I do not have the statistics. I am sure some of the expert testimony the committee will get in the future on this area will show there is a significant issue there. It is necessary to find interpreters. We have an enormous scarcity of interpreters per head of population. Someone going to university as a deaf signing person needs the highest quality interpreter to interpret complex terminology. It requires the best of the best. That is another difficulty in the educational context.

In addition, as I pointed out, a deaf person is four times less likely to be employed. Those who succeed, succeed despite the system. Although we have two deaf signers with doctorates, they are two people out of 5,000 first-language users on the island of Ireland who use ISL. A number of young people are coming towards that level, but that is through family-orientated support as pointed out by Deputy Clarke. That is because of the family background there. The whole family are able to sign. There may be older siblings who sign. It has been a whole-family success in those scenarios.

Senator Mark Daly opened the conference for me in 2016 in Portlaoise. He will recall that we brought two deaf ladies over from America, Leah Katz-Hernandez and Claudia Gordon. They are both deaf signing Americans who both worked in the White House. One was President Obama's West Wing adviser and the other was his social affairs adviser. We need to ensure that in the public service, in particular, we are the example for the rest of the world to look to. Up to now those people who rise to the top often do so in an educational context and stay within that educational context or sometimes public service. The people who go outside that need to go to the UK, Europe, Australia or America. Two close friends of ours recently moved abroad because they felt their deaf children would not reach their potential in Ireland. One had to move to the other side of the world to Australia, and one moved to the UK.