Mr. Patrick Smyth:

I thank the Deputy for that. Part of the positive aspect of this process has been a realisation by us about the fact that while we are desperately focused on the challenging role that we have in the provision of child protection welfare services and family supports, we need to be conscious in the delivery of those services to children and in terms of the education piece in which we are involved of the need, which I accept and see clearly, for an organisation like Tusla to be focused on their provision through Irish, where appropriate and required. Part of our experience, like many of the things that we are trying to put together, has been that this has allowed us to focus on what we need to do, and what we need to get in there are the basics. There are many standard pieces of documentation and so on in the organisation that we need to have in Irish. The challenge for us is much more about how we provide services that interact on a human level with children, foster carers and families so that we are seen as an organisation that can provide Irish language services.

This is somewhat reflective of the Chairperson's questions to us on what we are doing to support the training of staff as an ongoing exercise. That is something that we will look at to see if it may be an area in which we need some assistance, either through other organisations in the public service that do something similar, or we may need to look at how we do that in our own organisation. Until we have done that, there will probably be gaps in our knowledge of things that we think may or may not be possible. That for me is the take-away message from the process that we are in. I appreciate the Deputy's offer of support, and we may come back to the committee on that.