Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 January 2018

Joint Standing Committee on the Irish Language, the Gaeltacht and the Islands

Úsáid na Gaeilge i dTithe an Oireachtais: Ard Rúnaí, Seirbhís Thithe an Oireachtais

5:00 pm

Mr. Peter Finnegan:

To a large extent it is clear. The issue with the simultaneous translation of Acts was resolved with the Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2011 which allowed Acts to be published on the web. The difficulty was that once we hit 2010 or so, we had a moratorium because of the economic situation. It took until approximately 2014 before we could begin working our way out of that. In 2015 we sanctioned an additional three editors ar grád II and they commenced their work. It has been in the last year or so that we have been getting our heads around the exact extent of the problem and what we need to do about it. We took the decision collectively as a management team that, rather than operating on a piecemeal basis and introducing more staff, we needed to have an overall review of the area, which was why a capacity review was commissioned. PricewaterhouseCoopers was the firm which was subsequently engaged to carry that out. I envisage that we are facing into a fairly significant programme of change management.