Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)

Deputy Martin can only acknowledge that the PISA results were a wake-up call for the country. Other jurisdictions had similar challenges to Ireland in coping with children of varying languages and nationalities and those countries achieved higher PISA results. It cannot be explained by that one issue. Given the priority literacy and numeracy represent for this country, the Minister acted on the advice about curricular overload. He could not justify the continuation of the modern languages initiative in existing schools or its expansion to 3,200 schools, even if funding was not an issue.

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