Linguists agree that the mechanisms in place to handle the State's increasing translation and interpreting needs are partial, inadequate and lacking a sense of long-term purpose.
Because there is no system of official accreditation for interpreters, for instance, anyone can claim competence and State officials are under no obligation to insist on minimum standards.
A community worker in one small town in the west of Ireland tells of how children are regularly taken out of the local school to accompany a non-English speaking parent to the local GP, where the child could be the relay for an exchange on depression or the finer points of family planning.
At Temple Street Children's Hospital in Dublin, where one in five patients is from an ethnic minority background, this trend was spotted a few years ago. The hospital's response, says Lucy Nugent, its patient services manager, was to formalise agreements with two interpreting companies who are now on call day and night.
The hospital also translates some of its leaflets into foreign languages and offers staff training in dealing with those from different cultures.
"In the beginning people would arrive and there would be a friend with them, or in some cases they were using a 10-year-old who might be in school and would have some English, and he would be interpreting for a two-year-old sibling. That's inappropriate," says Nugent.
She believes the system works well - the interpreters are skilled and professional - but points out that it is still paid for through the hospital's base funding.
According to the governor of Mountjoy Prison, John Lonergan, language poses a "very significant problem" in the women's prison, where about a third of inmates are not Irish (most of them not migrants but people convicted of importing drugs into Ireland). When trying to convey basic information to those who speak no English, the prison relies on members of staff who speak a foreign language and sometimes uses another prisoner to interpret for a compatriot, but Lonergan is aware of the ethical questions that poses.
"It is an issue, and it is an issue that needs to be addressed. I know from talking to people in other services that it's not confined by any means to prisons. Every agency of the State has major difficulties around this.
"We had a problem with a woman who was trying to communicate that she wasn't well. But it was very, very difficult to know exactly what she was saying. You have no idea whether it's a personal issue, a health issue, a family issue. These are very practical things that 10 years ago it was a [ rarity] that you'd have to deal with it. Now it's a daily thing."
The Courts Service provides interpretation in up to 210 languages and dialects, and recently signed a contract with a large agency to provide all its translation and interpreting services. According to a spokesman, the "vast majority of occasions in which an interpreter is used pose no issue or problems in the understanding of the process by those involved."
When problems of clarity arise, the dynamic of the court setting makes this apparent and the interpreter is replaced.
Concerns in the area abound, however. Mary Phelan, a lecturer at Dublin City University's school of applied language and intercultural studies, says that interpreters employed by agencies have no official State-determined criteria to fulfil, and State bodies tend to accept their credentials as given.
"This whole issue of communication and translation and interpreting is just totally missed out on . . . Nobody's thinking of it. What they do think is, if we get an agency in, that solves the problem. We'll outsource the interpreters.
"The agency can look after it, we'll wash our hands of the problem," she says.
"Some agencies are more scrupulous than others, but a lot of agencies would just take on anybody they can find who speaks whatever language they need," she says.
Phelan, who has recently completed an advocacy paper on these issues for the NCCRI, says the availability of interpreters in provincial hospitals is "hit and miss", while the gardaí are working with "almost anybody".
"They work with freelance translators, they work with companies. It depends on the Garda station. Sometimes they'll work with the friend of a victim - that has happened in some cases."
She also notes the case in 2003 of a Chinese man accused of two murders who went on a date with the interpreter provided by gardaí for his interrogation. Officers later got a Chinese policeman through Interpol to assume the role of interpreter, and though the original linguist was not used in further interviews with the accused, she was used as an interpreter for other witnesses in the case.
Without specialised training in ethics, interpreters can break some of the first rules of the craft. In the courts and other tribunals, for instance, defendants have been known to ask their interpreter for guidance on how they should plead, and without the confidence or the training to fall back on, some may be tempted to respond.
At root, Phelan believes, the problem is the absence of standards. In the UK, she points out, only a third of those who take the Institute of Linguists test in public service interpreting pass it.
"So if you take a parallel from that, it's quite likely that of the interpreters that are working in Ireland at the moment, maybe one-third are competent and two-thirds are not.
"I think it's really worrying."