Ms Deirdre Shanley:

As I said, we have more than 190 members of staff who are willing to provide a service through Irish, but responsibility for the oversight of the official languages scheme and our languages responsibilities rests with the corporate services area. That is my area of responsibility and, unfortunately, I personally am not able to converse through Irish at a business level. However, Mr. Brown, who is from our divisional office in Galway, can speak through Irish. Again, however, we wanted to provide a good overview of our implementation of the Irish language scheme and the responsibility for that rests in the corporate area. Staff in our offices who are more than willing to provide services throughout the Department have been identified.