Mr. Donald Ewing:

English is very difficult. It is one of the least orthographically transparent languages. If you speak to anyone learning English as a second language, they will tell you that it is much harder than other languages. We do not have good phonics resources in Irish for the general population. Even with an integrated primary language curriculum, we do not approach teaching Irish in the same way as teaching English. Crucially for children with dyslexia, we do not have the additional structured literacy programmes that we know are effective in English. We do not have access to such programmes in Irish. They do not exist to the same degree. Part of that is because we use resources from across the water, both to the east and the west. The resources we know work in English are lacking in Irish, which is another cause for concern. Fundamentally, the approach we take to learning English is not taken with Irish across the board, with which we take a more whole-language approach, which has been well proven to be ineffective in teaching written language when compared to a phonological approach.