Dr. Fergal Lynch:

On the press statements, I agree and we are pleased that we have gotten up to 20%. The sort of criteria we use are particularly focused on the level of interest to the public, with a particular focus on service users and therefore, all of our early years press releases are done simultaneously in Irish. For example, the press release and the strategy document for First Five, which is the major strategy I was referring to earlier that was launched yesterday, were both published as Gaeilge and we placed a significant emphasis on that. In fact, the Government approved the strategy a number of weeks ago and one of the reasons we delayed publishing it was to make sure that it was translated into Irish and could be available at the same time as the English version.

On Irish language officers, the Department does not have a specific Irish language officer but my colleague Mr. Denis O'Sullivan was recently asked to take on the co-ordination function across the Department and he is a principal officer. He is not a native Irish speaker but one of his colleagues in the unit is and therefore we have a good deal of support within the Department for the level of Irish that is required.