Mr. David Leahy:

Yes, sin é. We are working together to ensure the standard of Irish. The person in question is already engaged in improving his or her Irish and that is a good thing and is expected. It is expected of us all. I am not happy that I do not have sufficient Gaeilge or that people on my team do not have sufficient Irish either. It is an ever-present challenge on which we wish to improve.

It is the only course we will pay for fully for all staff without question. If someone applies to do a course trí Ghaeilge, we will pay for it fully. It is the only course we will pay for in full for all staff. For clarity, we pay for some staff to do other courses if we require them to do certain things to upskill for their jobs. We might pay the full amount in cases like that but Gaeilge is the only one in GRETB we pay fully for all staff to engage in. For example, if people want to do a course in Galway university or a cúrsa samhraidh, we will pay for that.

We want people to improve. There are a whole series of things we are doing in GRETB to advance and improve Gaeilge which I have not referenced. That is the point I tried to make earlier. We are doing a lot. I accept we could do more. We will be ever challenged to try to do more but it is not as if the meon is not there. It actually is. It sounds defensive, I suppose, when you try to explain that you actually have an interest in it and that you see a real positive advantage in people doing it with the right disposition, that is, people doing it because they want to do it rather than us making it compulsory. Much more advantage and progress are achieved if there are people with the right disposition wishing to advance their Gaeilge for the right reasons.