Mr. Padraic Jones:

In terms of the public coming to An Garda Síochána and language barriers, we have procured a contract with a service provider that will give us interpreter services. I may stand corrected but on the last count, the figure was up to 80 languages and we can do that in person or by phone. Obviously, interpreters might be more prevalent depending on the relevance of the language or the strength of the population of a particular country in Ireland. If we are dealing with somebody from a country we would not normally come across, it may take additional time to get somebody on the phone or, more appropriately, in person to attend a Garda station, but we have a contract with people, we review it and it seems to be working quite well.

We are looking at sign language and visual impairment protocols. These are some of the pieces of work that start and work their way from the ground up. This is a colleague with experience in his own family in terms of visual impairment. He has come forward with a proposal that somebody with a visual impairment who requires a Garda service from his or her house can contact our control centre and be given a code word over the phone so that when the gardaí arrive, they will have been given the code word over a radio system, so when the person goes to answer the door, we say it is the Garda and the person can be satisfied it is the Garda because they will repeat the code word that was given to him or her by our controller.

They are some of the mechanisms we are working on at present. We have done quite an amount of work on Irish Sign Language. I am thinking in particular of the seminar and symposium that recently took place in County Donegal. Superintendent Fallon gave a lecture at a recent symposium in one of the universities in Dublin.