Mr. John Irwin:

On Senator Gallagher's question as to whether we believe we are talking to ourselves when we talk to the Department, the answer is "No". I would concur with Ms Irwin fully on that. The Department is quite open and I would say that a number of the initiatives which have been taken in recent times are through the dialogue that has taken place. That dialogue has been facilitated by the Department and by the Teaching Council. There are initiatives taking place. I would find the Department very open, to be quite honest, when meeting with it.

Going back to the teaching of Irish, Ms Irwin said that the Irish education system was a high-performing education system. Through the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, results, OECD comparisons and so on, we are performing very highly, but one area where the improvement has not been as dramatic as in other areas is in Irish but I think that has to do with a lot of historical baggage that has been attached to Irish at times. There has been a huge initiative and a lot of support is going in to try to improve the profile of Irish within schools. In certain cases, students resent having to study the language and that has been detrimental to the success of the language in schools at times.

Looking at key recommendations in terms of how we solve the immediate problems, we can look at the second year of the Professional Master of Education, PME, and how it provides the opportunity for second year PME teachers to teach in schools and to be paid. This will also assist in alleviating some of the costs they have in terms of achieving their qualifications.

We have to look at two other areas. I refer to return pathways for those who are away and how we encourage them back into our system and how we make it easier for them to come back and identify vacancies easily. I refer also to the entry of experienced people from the private sector if they want to become involved and bring that experience to education and making that access easier.