Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I raise the issue of the leaving certificate Chinese Mandarin course, which is in its infancy and being put together by the Department of Education. This may be a niche issue because we do not have huge take-up on it yet but there is an opportunity for Irish schoolchildren to get involved in and study Mandarin.

An issue of controversy arises regarding the use of the characters or script used for learning Mandarin. Mandarin is the official language in China but is one dialect of thousands existing across that country, many of which are mutually unintelligible and as different as German and Spanish. It is understandable that the Chinese have chosen to identify one dialect, namely, the Han dialect of Mandarin, to be the lingua francaand it allows them all to communicate. When the simplified characters were brought in in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a solid rationale for that. They were brought in by the People's Republic of China and the communist party primarily to address literacy issues after the creation of the state in 1949. One in five people could read or write in China at that time. For understandable reasons, the Chinese Government decided to put in place an easier script for them to use. Traditional Chinese script, which has been in use for thousands of years, has thousands of characters and is complex. The idea of simplified characters existed long before the communist party put it into practise in 1949 and after. However, there are still large communities in places like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao who continue to use the traditional characters. Those characters bring with them a huge breadth of cultural and historical significance that is lost with the simplified characters. I do not criticise the use of simplified characters. They were effective in bringing an enormous population into the bounds of literacy.

The difficulty I have is that the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, under the aegis of the Department of Education, has made the decision that the leaving certificate course here will only deal with the simplified characters used in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, thereby excluding those who come from areas where traditional characters are used. That is at variance with many other English-language jurisdictions around the world, like the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. They have offered students the choice between the two different scripts. They can do the exams, coarse and curriculum in either the simplified characters or the traditional ones used in certain areas. I recognise the Minister said on 8 July this was designed for ab initio learners, rather than immigrant or migrant communities. However, many thousands or even tens of thousands of people in this country come from Hong Kong, Taiwan or a community where the traditional characters are used.By putting this in place, we know they will still study leaving certificate Mandarin but we are denying them the opportunity to learn that aspect of the script and the culture that is attached to Mandarin Chinese. The other aspect is that if they only learn the simplified characters, it denies them access to another corpus of literature and material, and all that comes with that, which they might otherwise have.

The issue I am raising today is not to say we should not have simplified characters or that they are in any way wrong; it is to say that we should be giving students the choice. There is a real gap in the curriculum in that we are saying they must deal with one type of script when there are two available and two in use all over the world, sometimes necessarily, for example, in the United States, to communicate to both communities who use them. I hope the Minister of State can take that on board.