Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Teaching Transforms, the initiative to bring people from more diverse backgrounds into the teaching profession, is fantastic and I fully support it. What are the Minister's views as to how this can be congruent with keeping standards in Irish language teaching up to scratch? Perhaps there is an opportunity here. When I graduated from Mary Immaculate College, we had 12 subjects to teach. I can still rattle them off: maths, English, Irish, history, geography, science, drama, music, PE, art, SPHE and religion. Every month, we had to tick those boxes in the cuntas míosúil. It is a hell of a workload for any teacher to get his or her head around. Whether we like it or not, we end up specialising in a few subjects and really hone our skills in those areas. Is there scope to do as other countries have and introduce subject-specific teachers in certain areas? These would teach the general curriculum but also specialise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics , STEM, the Irish language, the arts or something like that. This could give the Irish language a big lift.