Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Ar an gcéad dul síos, gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit, Deputy Josepha Madigan, a bheith anseo an tráthnóna seo don díospóireacht seo.

I have been listening intently to this wonderful debate. It brings me back to my school days when I was working in my cousin's business, which was a part hardware and agricultural store. I can recall clearly a small number of customers, in particular, men, who would come and buy their goods, whether it was fertiliser, fencing posts or whatever. They would throw down their chequebook and say, "Fill that in.", and I would reply, "No, you do it." Some years afterwards, I realised that some of those people were suffering from dyslexia. The point I am trying to make is it was such a shame people never wanted to talk about it. They would not tell their spouses or adult children. Many people say to me nowadays that they suffered with this for many years but they were so ashamed to mention it. That is why it is important to have this debate, to have this awareness month and to have additional State funding going into the system, but also to appeal to people out there who suffer in their everyday lives with this and do not want to talk to anybody about it. Maybe sometimes even students do not want to talk to their parents or guardians about it. Maybe part of the reason some young people do not want to go to school is the embarrassment of it.

When I look at some of the modern lingo on social media, I wonder whether we are all gone a bit dyslexic at times even though we probably deliberately shorten words, etc.There has been a complete change in the way we deal with language. The way we deal with nouns, verbs, adverbs and so on has changed, particularly among younger people.

In talking about our education system, I would like to see a greater focus on why some youngsters do not want to continue with school or even hate school. I firmly believe that it could be to do with dyslexia. When I think back to my own days in school, I had a huge difficulty with mathematics. To this day, if I am asked to add, subtract, multiply or divide, I can beat anyone but do not put algebra or anything like that in front of me because I would be the worst person in this room and in Ireland at it. That is a form of dyslexia but we do not look at it that way. It is the same with people who have a difficulty with Irish, history, geography and so on. It is a huge problem within our education system and is far more common than is recognised but the fact that we have open debates about it and that people are more willing to talk about it is good. As legislators, we must look out for young people and adults. In the past, people would have asked me to fill in cheques for them because they could not or would not do it but they would not say that it was anything to do with dyslexia. Nowadays it is easier for people to talk about it. Good friends have come to me in recent years and told me that they or their family members were dyslexic. Many of those people are real achievers in life. Some are really good business people and really good communicators but they have kept hidden the fact that they cannot write properly or deal with that part of life.

It is great to have the Minister of State here for this debate and to listen to everyone's point of view on the issue. It is an issue that we should focus on more and I thank the Minister of State for taking the time to be here today to discuss it.