Ms Fiona McDonnell:

Within the early years inspectorate we have 4,459 services, so the Irish language services, predominantly the naíonraí, are 6% of services at 259. We have a lot of work yet to do in this area. We are committed to the Irish language and we have representatives on our consultative forum and our regulatory support forum from the Gaelscoileanna and Comhar Naíonraí na Gaeltachta, CNNG.

On inspections, we only have one inspector in place who is fluent in the Irish language and that inspector is placed in a Gaeltacht area. We are just finishing a campaign to have an additional inspector in another Gaeltacht area, and we intend that over the next three years we will have Irish language speakers as inspectors in all Gaeltacht areas.

On the campaign that we undertook, we did not have large numbers applying for the job. This was not because of the Irish language requirement but because there was also the requirement to have an early years background for inspections and so forth. That is limited so that is something that we have to work on.

On when we inspect services and naíonraí, many of our inspectors would have the basics to be able to talk at a basic level of Irish so they are conscious that the majority of the interaction is through English. In 2019, we intend to undertake training assessment and training need and to try to identify people, in the Gaeltacht areas in particular, with whom we can expand and improve on that.

On inspections reports, we translate them when requested. We are conscious that it is just when we are requested to do so. We publish many documents in Irish and we publish a lot of documents. This includes our quality regulatory framework. We intend to publish every single document we have in Irish, but we have linked very strongly with our member representation from the Irish language community, particularly through our consultative forum, and they give us advice on which documents are more important to them. However, we see that within five years we should be in a better position and we will be able to facilitate inspections, maybe not wholly or absolutely but to a better level than we have done, and we will put more expertise within the Gaeltacht areas.