Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour)
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I welcome the Minister and his officials. I join with the previous speaker in congratulating the Minister on the Department and its success. Some of us were unconvinced as to the necessity of a new Department but it has proven its worth. It is now a feature and a fixture and deserves to be. The Minister made a success of it and that needs to be acknowledged. We share many aspirations about free education, particularly in the area of literacy, which he has done great work on and I congratulate him on that.

On the cross-Border piece, I want to focus on one issue today, if I might, which feeds into the cross-Border discussion. On teacher training, to put it delicately, there is an issue regarding the cohort of teachers we are training and the qualifications that necessitate their access to teacher training courses. Barriers to teacher training are placed in front of young people from certain backgrounds. They might be from disadvantaged or Traveller backgrounds or they could be from the North or overseas. Some of those barriers relate to the Irish language. This is a difficult one to verbalise because many people feel very strongly about the Irish language, as I do myself; I have a degree in Irish. I try to pronounce my name to people with great difficulty in every election. The serious point is that the requirement of the standard of Irish to enter training colleges needs to be challenged. What we need in teacher training is a diverse population of teachers in our primary schools that reflects the children they are teaching. It is still a very white, middle-class teaching profession. It does not reflect a new Ireland or any new Ireland we want to promote. The Irish language could also be seen as a barrier, particularly in terms of the North. Would it not work better, considering the new Ireland we hope to engage with, to have people from more disadvantaged backgrounds, who may not have had higher level Irish as an option in their second level school? They certainly might not have had the chance to go to the Gaeltacht three summers in a row for financial reasons. Would it not be better to focus on their ability to learn and teach Irish when they are in training college, rather than as a requirement to get into training college?

It is still such a powerful profession. If someone comes from a minority, be it ethnic or any other kind of minority, particularly disadvantaged children, and if he or she has somebody from his or her community as a learning and educational leader in the classroom, it is incredibly powerful. While it is not the only barrier, perhaps the Irish language requirement could be tweaked a little, not in any way to reduce the quality of Irish language teaching in the classroom, but to do it in a way that teachers are empowered to teach Irish better when they are in training college, rather than having that funnel exclude some people who may not have had the opportunity to learn Irish at second level. They could be students from the North or a disadvantaged background or abroad. How powerful would it be to have somebody who came here as an asylum seeker working as a primary school teacher? The one reason they probably cannot is the requirement to have Irish entering teacher training college. It is an issue I have tried to pursue for a long time. At one point, we had a number of students from DEIS second level schools in my constituency learning Irish and getting grinds in Marino Institute of Education. That was a solution. Some managed to achieve the required Irish language level and they became teachers. We were proud of that, but it is not a long-term fix. I wanted to bounce that off the Minister, to use this platform to raise it and see if he has any sense of how we could move on that.