Mr. Donald Ewing:

I am afraid we do not collect statistics on the number of people with dyslexia who do foreign languages or continue at any given level within the leaving certificate. Even if those statistics were available, it would be risky to presuppose we had picked up everyone with dyslexia. There is a massive problem with false negatives in respect of dyslexia rather than a problem with false positives, although we sometimes behave as if we have a problem with false positives. We can expect 10% of young people attending school in Ireland to have dyslexia and to be somewhere on that spectrum. We know that we are nowhere near those levels. We could do research and ask school principals to take 10% of their school enrolment and to compare that to the number of children with identified needs. Where there is a mismatch, I would be very concerned about misidentification or non-identification. This would have an impact on literacy because these children may not be getting the right literacy supports. There is also a lot of research indicating that misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis has a massive impact on confidence, self-esteem and mental health. I want to make sure that the lived experience of dyslexia is presented here today along with the other issues because our phone is ringing off the hook five days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with calls from very worried parents whose children are not getting supports and not getting identified and for whom the richness of multilingualism is way down the list of priorities. They want their children not to feel sick on a Thursday or a Sunday night as a result of anxiety about spelling tests and being made to read out loud in class. I want to make sure that experience is presented. To answer the Deputy's question, we do not collect statistics of that nature but I again suggest that, if we did, we would be very unsure about the quality of those data because the systems in place for identifying people with additional support needs are not in place.