Ms Deirdre Shanley:

The Department is very committed to improving the bilingual services it offers on an ongoing basis and our ambition is not to have only five members of staff recruited from Irish language panels. That just happens to be the current figures. Our recruitment process is ongoing, and as Mr. O'Leary mentioned, the panels have not been available to us for that long.

The Department's services have two main types, our direct local services, mainly provided by our Intreo centres and the services provided by our centralised schemes. Dealing with the Intreo centres, which are located in every county, most of these currently provide a telephone or a face-to-face service through Irish, where staff members have been identified who can provide that service.

In addition, our centralised schemes have staff available to provide a telephone service through Irish. We have more than 75 locations where we have an Irish service available, apart from the full service that is available in our Gaeltacht offices. We have four offices in Gaeltacht areas that provide a full face to face and direct Irish language service.

I draw attention to the Department's development in terms of digital services and the provision of same. More and more services are being offered online. The Department offers applications online for a lot of our schemes and many of our customers are choosing to go online. The Department has made the commitment that these services will be developed and delivered bilingually. In the written opening statement I provided, I mentioned that the services we have developed and put on these platforms have been developed in both Irish and English. It is our commitment that the new services will not go live without an Irish service being available.

The Department is focused on improving the services that are there. We recognise that there is more to be done and we can continue to improve. We are conscious that the figure of 191 is not as high as we would like it to be. It is something we are trying to improve both through recruitment and through training and development. I have mentioned the training and development supports already such as refund of fees for people who want to study in their own time but we also give time and support to staff to under take Irish courses via-----