Ms Sorcha Heaphy:

If the Deputy can imagine, there is a group of agents sitting in the room and they have to cover off a number of hours per day over the course of the week. Our telephone lines are open 24 a day, seven days a week but the vast majority of those calls are going to come in during the standard working day Monday to Friday. There have certainly been challenges for Capita, which is contracted and obliged to ensure we have an Irish-language service offering through the contract we have with it. We have seen instances where complaints have come in to us and there is no shying away from that. We have made huge efforts and we have put time into ensuring the service that is available is improving all the time. What we have seen now is that we have been able to increase the recruitment pool that is available to us, that is the number of physical individuals who are able to provide that voice at the end of the telephone. However, it has to be said that if there is going to be a high volume of telephone calls - in the event of a boil water notice or some other issue - those calls have to be answered. Therefore, a caller might find themselves going down the pecking order list if he or she ended up pressing the number 9 for the Irish line. That is hugely unfortunate but when there is a significantly high volume of calls, the desire is that we engage with as many of those callers as physically possible. What tends to happen when people phone in and brú uimhir 9 - it is not a haon nó a dó for us - is that a person might understandably have a short wait time. I phoned myself this morning before we came into the committee room. The deal is that a person gets connected to an Irish-language speaker who is at the other end of the phone. If that service is not available, for example, if that individual is on another telephone call with another customer, you are given the option to have a telephone call returned back to you and can leave a message to either ask for that return call or join the non-Irish side of the waiting callers. Both options are there.