Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

Our children are no less intelligent than they ever were. The surveys I carried out myself many years ago in the Department of Education showed that the Irish Celtic route is actually more favourable to learning languages than many others, and I suppose many students come here to learn English because of the quality of the language spoken by our young people in particular. We need to start the process at a much lower level, at junior certificate level and before that, as languages are picked up by children in primary school without any great difficulty.

It is the teaching methods that are critical here. The Deputy, as a former múinteoir, knows this himself. It is now easy to learn modern languages in so many ways, given the facilities. We should look at what we have done. After 70 years, the vast majority of young people leaving the secondary school system are still not conversant in the language of their native country. The Deputy speaks about compulsion and the Labour Party in England. That is a matter for it. We have a compulsory language, and it has not delivered in the context of fluency.

I share the view of the chief executive that we could do so much more in terms of modern languages. We are in the top 20 globally in terms of competitiveness. We are in the top three in terms of availability and flexibility of workforce. We are in the top three in terms of the productivity of our workers. Language is very specialist. In a global sense, when that particular company deals with different dialects, it needs fluency. That is an issue we as a people should be able to address and that Government will address. I would like to think that when multinationals and foreign direct investment companies make the decision to site here they do so for a package of issues be it tax, technology, track record or talent and in that talent there is always an issue for language fluency.

In the Deputy's county recently I spoke to people in a number of multinationals where the receptionists deal with different languages. Some of them are international; some are Irish. I spoke to somebody the other day about the Japanese companies which come here. One firm has a Donegal native who speaks fluent Japanese and has been doing so for many years. There is no restriction upon us in having the competence to learn languages fluently. It is a combination of teaching method, and the capacity to teach it properly, that makes our young people aware of the opportunities that come from being able to speak language with the fluency required by business these days.

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