Mr. John Howlin:

As I said, I am a member of the Irish-language services advisory committee. There is a lot of working going on with a view to developing the kind of system the Deputy has described to attract Irish-language speakers and to ensure they can fill the gaps in service provision identified by the committee. Ms McCabe might speak to the range of competitions being run in that regard. The OneLearning service, the learning and development service, also comes under my Department. This runs a range of training courses. These are now certified by TEG and so fall under the recognised European language framework. Over recent years, more than 1,000 civil servants have gone through one of those OneLearning courses, which run from A1, the beginner level, up to B2, an intermediate level acknowledged by the experts in Maynooth as sufficient to allow someone to interact to deliver a public service.

The Department, PAS and the Irish advisory committee recognise that innovation is needed in creating new recruitment pathways and developing this new system.

We are looking at new pathways in, one of which is an apprenticeship model. There has been work with the Department of further and higher education and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to develop that but it takes a bit of time to develop an apprenticeship of that nature. We are facilitating civil servants in developing their Irish-language capabilities, seeking to attract Irish-language speakers and developing the skills we need in the public service through those types of apprenticeships. We are also looking at internships. More generally, we are looking at opportunities, including those created by the Act, in respect of communications. There are different requirements and targets in that regard, which may create new opportunities to bring Irish-language speakers into the system. We are looking at bringing in new Irish-language speakers to support those kinds of targets.