Ulick Burke (Fine Gael)

The Minister told the House she was a teacher of Irish up to honours leaving certificate standard for 17 years. It was amazing that she should have said that she would not understand or recognise that when the choice was given, those who would take Irish at the highest level at leaving certificate would be those who wanted to learn and be involved in Irish. It is a point the Minister conveniently ignored.

The Minister should re-examine the NCCA's 2003 report. It clearly indicates that it is important to leave politics aside and provide a living language. We can like the language or love it. However, if Government policy in this area is developed and implemented, we can have a living language. The NCCA report states:

We do not have an integrated language curriculum, but a series of language curricula that are largely independent of one another. Arguably this leads to an impoverished educational experience; it certainly means that curriculum planning is haphazard and piecemeal. The same Irish curricula are taken by the minority of students who are native speakers of Irish and/or attending Irish-medium schools and the English-medium majority for whom Irish is a second language. This situation is linguistically and educationally indefensible, and until it is remedied there is little realistic prospect of raising the levels of proficiency achieved by the non-native-speaker majority in Irish.

That is the key to the issue, and the sentiment which Deputy Kenny had in mind.