Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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15. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the estimated number and percentage of civil servants who are competent to carry out their duties through the medium of Irish and English; his views on whether this number is adequate; his plans to increase this number and percentage; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2579/14]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The detailed information requested by the Deputy in his question is not available as it is not collected on a routine basis by my Department. 

In October, 2013, the Government approved the introduction of a new approach to support Irish language proficiency in the civil service to replace the policy of awarding bonus marks for Irish language proficiency in civil service recruitment and promotion competitions.

As a first step, the new arrangements will be piloted in the upcoming Executive Officer (EO) recruitment competition in Spring 2014. It is proposed that a sub-panel of Irish language functional bilinguals comprising up to 6% of the overall EO panel size, will be created.

In the case of Departmental recruitment and promotion competitions, an assessment will be made of the requirement for functional bilinguals and, where necessary and appropriate, a sub-panel of functional bilinguals will be put in place.

Where a post is identified as requiring proficiency in Irish, the intention is that it should be filled by a functional bilingual. The use of staff currently serving in such posts will be a matter for the individual Departments to decide.

As part of the implementation of these new arrangements, my officials wrote to Departments on 17 December last, asking them to review the workforce planning frameworks previously submitted and to identify posts/areas of work requiring functional bilinguals and to include these in a revised workforce action plan. This exercise is expected to provide information on the demand from Departments for functional bilinguals and will facilitate arrangements being put in place to ensure that the requirement for Government Departments to provide services through Irish is met.