Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)
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Ba bhreá liom leanúint ar aghaidh i nGaeilge ach tá mo chuid Ghaeilge beagnach go léir caillte agam anois. I am interested in the views of Mr. Ó hAiniféin, as someone who obviously has a huge passion for the language and is very much intent on securing its future, on a couple of things. Delegates from An Foras Pátrúnachta were in here a few months ago discussing the very same challenge, which is the challenge we face in retaining our language for the future. I recall one statistic. I may have it wrong, but perhaps Senator Ó Clochartaigh might know it. It was something along the lines that less than 50% of the children attending schools in Gaeltacht areas are now using Irish as their first language at home. I remember Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív and I were quite taken aback by the statistic. I can only speak from my experience as a parent and as someone who has worked on the boards of management of a couple of schools in my locality - normal, English-speaking schools teaching Irish as a subject - and I will be frank, but, in my opinion, and it is one I have been expressing for a number of years, we are failing miserably in this country in teaching the language and, far more important, in retaining a love and passion for the language among our young people. Some of our primary schools are exceptionally successful in this area, but it appears that in the first one or two years of post-primary education in non-Gaelscoileanna, whatever progress had been made up to that point is lost all of a sudden. Children, young people and students go backwards instead of forwards in terms of their understanding and grasp of the language.

Then those who are fortunate enough to be able to afford it go to the Gaeltacht for three weeks or a month and something transformational happens. It has happened to a couple of my nephews and nieces and to my son. They went there and, in the space of a month, a resurgence of an interest in the language was somehow sparked in them. I suppose this is because of their immersion in the language and the culture associated with it. More important, however, they saw their peers, young people of their own age, using the language daily in Connemara. I say Connemara because this is predominantly where they go. What happens there that is not happening in the school environment? Is there some way we can recreate it? Is and has our focus always been on the minutiae of the language? All of us speak fluent English, yet if we were challenged on the rules of English grammar, I am sure few of us would have the knowledge to be able to explain adequately the rudiments of it. Yet things like the modh coinníollach and the tuiseal ginideach and all that stuff were hammered into us from day one.

There seems to be more of a focus on having our children understand the origins of the language rather than encouraging them to speak it. If a person wants to go on and learn the language at third level, there should be a focus on those aspects. However, at leaving certificate level our only ambition should be to be able to take young people from Athenry or Longford, for example, and drop them into Connemara, Donegal or Kerry with the competence to at least have a basic conversation with a young person of their own age who uses Irish as a first language. We are failing miserably in trying to achieve that. For me, that should be our only ambition. If we have young people leaving school with a basic conversational standard of Irish who retain a love of the language because it was not something that was hammered unremittingly into them and is something they feel passionate about, we will have succeeded in educating our young people in terms of our language. We are not succeeding at the moment. I know it is a very big question, but where are we going wrong? Why can we not replicate what happens in the Gaeltacht for that one month, which in my experience is transformational, in the classroom?