Ms Margaret McCabe:

I can take that question. When we find a post that we cannot fill, we would go back to the Department. We would work closely with any Department, which I believe I said in my opening statement, to see what we can do differently this time which might attract more people in. We would do the same with any difficult-to-fill posts and not just posts through Irish as there are other posts with which we would have to do that. We would try to see if there are any other areas we can address.

In PAS, we always put together an advertising plan for the areas we need to focus on to see if we can get posts filled within those vacancies. As I have said, the numbers are just not applying but that is across the board. It is the same for all the Civil Service grades at the moment. The numbers are not applying like they were in the past because there is full employment. It is that attraction piece. We do it through the schools and school projects. We have done quite a bit of work on that to uplift the number of Irish-language applicants.