Mr. David Gordon:

I thank the Chairman. Deputy Ó Snodaigh made a very valid point when he asked why we do not try to keep staff who speak Irish, and on the other point he made about CVs and the job. As somebody who deals with HR, I agree with him about the CVs. They come in glowing and when they are put in an area it does not quite work out. That has happened to me with Irish-speaking people as well. When I was looking for staff for the Gaeltacht unit, the level of Irish required, both written and oral, was quite high, and while candidates were still very good, they were not at that level, so I was trying to re-appoint them within the Department to other Irish areas. The problem with holding on to people who have Irish is that the system of recruitment and promotion within the Civil Service has changed quite a lot in the last seven or eight years. A lot of recruitment is through open competitions and if somebody comes in with Irish they will naturally apply for an open competition to the next grade and be appointed off an open competition to another Department that might have nothing to do with Irish, but is in the next grade. That is a difficulty for us. There is a suggestion maybe to make it an allowance-led system or something like that, but at the moment it is extremely difficult. We also have it in auditing, where people do auditing courses for two years and then they apply for promotion six or eight months later and are gone to another Department, so it is no different in other areas of the Department. It is a real conundrum for us to deal with in trying to hold on to staff.

I was asked about the promotion of Irish. The social club within the Department asked people a couple of weeks ago about getting fáinnes, which the club would order directly, and getting people to wear them in the Department. It is that suggestion that the Deputy was talking about that is happening on a much smaller scale within the Department.