Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the idea of identifying the posts but the Minister must accept that functional bilinguals will not necessarily take posts where Irish is a requirement. There is a career path in the Civil Service.

Does the Minister accept that not every functional bilingual will be in a job identified by the Department as requiring such language proficiency? Will he accept that in other jurisdictions there is outside independent verification that the person concerned has the language competency to carry out his or her duties within the specified languages, in this case Irish and English?

The Minister mentioned that a panel of bilinguals comprising up to 6% of the EO panel would be established. Working on the basis of full replacement of staff in the Civil Service, would he accept that approximately 3% of the total number of civil servants are recruited each year? Would he agree that 0.18% of the increase - minus those who leave the service in any given year - would consist of functional bilinguals? Would he accept that currently, approximately 2% of the public service are functional bilinguals? After ten years of this policy, we would be lucky to have 3.5% functional bilinguals in the system. Does the Minister consider 3.5% adequate to provide services for people across a wide range of areas?

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