Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

I will do my best to follow the Deputy's question. I understand Deputy Sargent is asking about the delay between the publication of the Irish version of Bills and other documents. I am disappointed if that is the case and the Deputy correctly stated the Department of Finance has provided the resources to the Houses of the Oireachtas and to Departments to provide a translation service. A number of companies are providing a service used by Departments for translation purposes. Within the service, a number of individuals are providing the staff to do so.

I readily admit it will take us some time to build up sufficient staff across all functional areas to provide a comprehensive service. I speak with reference to my Department. A core group of staff exists to translate and deal with memoranda and letters but we do not have them in every area. In the normal course we would segregate correspondence to the section but we must use the core group of staff to improve the service. Based on what the Coimisinéir Teanga stated, my Department has sought to increase staff training at an advanced and junior level. We have built up a dossier of translations to try to create uniformity of reply in Departments. While there have been some delays, we have tried hard and over the period of the programme will continue to try to get proficiency in handling queries for each division. That will take work and time but over the period of the plan we should be able to do so.

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