Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Since taking up office as Minister of State with responsibility for European affairs, I have met my officials on this issue. It is a priority to address the decreased number of Irish people working in the institutions. With that in mind, I have had extensive meetings on this to continue to develop the strategy that is already under way thanks to my predecessor. I have arranged a number of meetings with stakeholders for the coming weeks. The Deputy raises the very important point that it is not simply about the application procedure and encouraging people. We have deficiencies in this country in terms of languages. Certainly in the programme for Government negotiations I was very keen to have the modern languages initiative reinstated at primary school. That is in the programme for Government and I will working on that with my colleague, the Minister for Education and Skills. We have a national hang-up about languages and it is about time we got over it. I do not know what the reason is but we are bad at learning languages and that includes our national language. I was very pleased to speak Irish last week at the General Affairs Council. There is not much point in fighting for its status and then not using the language when we have that status.

The programme for Government makes a very clear commitment to the development of a new strategy to increase the presence of Irish people in the senior ranks of institutions and in respect of the number of young people. This is a critical issue for this country. I join the Deputy in saying that it is so important for us to constantly talk about the benefits of European Union membership. I have endeavoured to do so even over the last two days. The very fact of an agreement at European level this weekend, that give and take, those negotiations, those tough talks will undoubtedly bring immense benefits to all of the European Union. We have seen that over the decades and will continue to benefit from it. We have peace and stability in Europe and thank God for it.

I would be more than happy to engage with all colleagues in the House and with Deputy Richmond on this issue. It is a challenge that, working together, we can address. I fully intend to continue to build upon the work of my predecessors on this issue and to bring real improvements to the numbers of Irish people working in the institutions. I also wish to pay tribute to those who are working in this country in the various offices and agencies of the institutions, including at Grange in my constituency.

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