Dr. Fergal Lynch:

Responding to those two questions, first within the Pobal system of inspections, there are 47 inspectors throughout. I cannot give a precise figure of those who are fluent in Irish but I know their policy and practice is to use the inspectors who have fluent or sufficiently good Irish in the Gaeltacht areas or areas of Irish speaking. They do their very best to carry out their inspections in Irish to the greatest possible extent. They produce the inspection reports in Irish. In addition, the agreement is even if their own Irish is not particularly good, they make every possible effort to speak to the children in Irish. I do not have a specific number but I am aware that Pobal has laid a good emphasis on trying to match Irish speaking inspectors with areas where the services are being carried out in Irish.

On the website, as referred to in my opening statement, we recently launched a new website. Approximately 52% of everything on it is in Irish. If one is looking specifically at the early years area, which I appreciate is one of particular interest to parents, we have made good progress. There is a very high proportion of the materials in Irish, including the leaflets, the posters, the explanations and the descriptions of the schemes etc. We are launching the new affordable childcare scheme next year. The IT system and the website is being built for that currently and a specific requirement is that this website will be available in Irish at the touch of a button, literally, from the home page.

We have made good progress in other areas in that regard. We have run into some difficulties with one of the older websites which is just about to be replaced, which it has not been easy to build in a complete Irish configuration. For those people using the website, I am not saying it is perfect, but certainly in the early years context and that of the Department website overall, tangible progress has been made over the last number of years, particularly recently.