Mr. John Sherwin:

The institutions around the world are developing language corpus models of sign language. There is an American Sign Language, ASL, and a British Sign Language, BSL. There is not a significant Irish Sign Language one yet. Typically, these are done in collaboration between government and academia. We have an Irish deaf research network, which involves academia and deaf academics. We are looking to find a way to build that corpus, which is a quantity situation. We need to have thousands upon thousands of hours of Irish Sign Language being communicated so large language models can learn from that. That will be core to the development of any AI-powered translation or interpretation and the accuracy of that. That is a piece of work around which there is not a strong strategy at the moment. There should be. It needs to have deaf people involved. We saw on the news not too long ago a proposal by one TD that Irish Sign Language should be included in the Constitution as the third language of Ireland.

That is something we would like to campaign for in the future but, for the moment, Irish Sign Language is not taught to deaf people in schools. They learn sign language through their communities. There is no standardisation of Irish Sign Language. There is no terminology committee. All these things inform the fact that, as a result, without even a terminology committee, there is no corpus of Irish Sign Language at the moment. That is a key element in the development of AI and ISL in the future. One specialist topic working group will be involved in the development of the new human rights strategy. It is an Irish Sign Language working group. This will come up on the agenda of that group to see what we can do and how we can help the Government to do some medium- and long-term planning around this.