Mr. Nicholas Meehan:

I might say something on behalf of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. As the committee will be aware, the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has set up a committee, of which the Public Appointments Service, PAS, and ourselves are members, and they can also ask others to take part in this. As the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht has said, "research will be commissioned aimed at identifying inter aliapriority areas for the recruitment of Irish speaking officials and the provision of services in Irish". Then the Department gives a list and we can provide the committee with details of that. Both the PAS and we are intimately involved with that group. As committee members know, it is a six-year plan and part of it is about recruiting functional bilinguals and more Irish speakers and examining how we can do that. There is also an issue in that our Irish-speaking people see careers in primary teaching, for example, whereas they may not be aware the Civil Service also offers rewarding careers for Irish speakers. People can move around in the Civil Service. If a person gets a job that requires Irish, he or she is not restricted to remaining in that area unless he or she wishes to.

The recent mobility scheme for clerical officers, COs, and EOs allows people to click on a button that allows them to stay in an Irish language area if they prefer to do so. If an Irish language job comes up they can apply for that themselves rather than applying for English-speaking jobs so we are trying to address the issue. We also have to recall that the moratorium was only lifted in 2015.