Mr. Andrew Geary:

It is up to each family to throw itself off the deep end into deaf culture, the deaf community and Irish Sign Language. We pay for it ourselves. There is a home tuition scheme of one hour a week. As we all know from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, CEFRL, and QQI levels, it takes a minimum of 600 hours to become proficient in a language. We have to become the role model for our children in gaining this proficiency. Until we have done 600 to 800 hours as per the CEFRL scale, we are not a fluent proficient model of language for our own children. We have to bring these people into our homes and introduce our children to people who are fluent in Irish Sign Language or signing interpreters to make sure they reach any level of proficiency. Our deaf children miss out on 90% to 95% of incidental learning in the first three to five years. I have twins. One is deaf and one has hearing. Donnacha received a minimum of 200 times more proficient language in the first five years of his life if we were to define my wife and I as proficient language users, which we were not.