Mr. Shane Hamilton:

During transition year, we went on a lot of trips, mostly in Dublin but we also went to Cork. We recently went to Galway as well. The interpreter we had for each of those trips was mostly the same person.

That is not a negative thing. It shows me that it is difficult to book an interpreter who is able to be there on time and able to provide support. An interpreter is definitely needed for transition year trips because an SNA from our school will not always be able to go with them. Most of the time the teacher will try to help. However, as Ms O'Rourke mentioned, it is difficult to get a teacher who already knows Irish Sign Language, ISL, by hand. They focus on getting the ISL course in. Interpreters are an important part of trips, especially when we recently went to Galway for the F1 competition. We had two interpreters there. One of interpreters was a very nice person who had been on a few trips. I noticed she was on our trips all the time. It feels weird to have the same person every time. You hear talk about all these different interpreters. There are meant to be a great many interpreters, so why am I seeing just the one person for every trip?