Mr. Patrick Smyth:

The Deputy referred to the number of staff within the organisation who have competence in the Irish language. I think there is no doubt that the true figure is much higher. The Deputy is right when he says there is a need to survey that. We have undertaken to do so next year. Many of the staff employed in our educational welfare services are former teachers. We definitely have access to people with good Irish language skills in that area. However, this element of our service is not focused on the front end of child protection. When we are recruiting people to work at the front end of child protection, we tend to look at the skills first. That has been the case in the past. While Tusla has been able to recruit a large number of social workers in recent years, it has struggled insofar as there has been quite a turnover in social worker skills. We must try to address the need to have good social workers in place who have solid language skills in addition to the necessary skill set for working in child protection.

Our first case in recent years has been to try to get the social workers with those protection skills in place, but I take the point. We have a lot more staff within Tusla who have those skills. Part of our process is to try to put the plan together, make it attractive and have a survey of staff done, but it is also to encourage and support staff who have Irish language skills to move into service areas where they can support children who are brought up through Irish.

I reference the point we made about the early years inspectorate, whose job it is to look at the naíonraí and the early years education services and inspect same. We have inspected quite a number of those in recent years and the communication is rarely with the children in those areas. It is usually with the management. The capacity to do those inspections through Irish is there, but we are conscious that we need to invest more and bring in a number of extra people for that. What we have not done and what we plan to do next year is to have an Irish language officer or someone who has that work attached to them who can co-ordinate, make that a focus and allow us at least to put a plan in place, but who can also be somebody who is a central point in supporting Irish language service delivery.

We are aware of the capacity in terms of speaking to the media. My colleague, Mr. Breen, can give some more information on our plans in that area.