Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Much of that is information the Minister, Deputy Foley, has put into the public domain before. One change is that she had said previously that this might have implications for vocabulary, syntax, language use and, potentially, cultural use. She seems to have dropped the cultural aspect whereas I would see this as being exactly the crux of the issue. There is a significant difference in the experience of language learners depending on whether they are using simplified or traditional characters. My concern is that, even with new learners, we are cutting them off from a whole corpus of literature from places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, and many members of the immigrant community here come from those countries.

The real danger is that we are exposing ourselves to an accusation that we are selling out this curriculum to a foreign power - that being Beijing and China - and that we are only adopting theirs because, in that way, students of Mandarin only have access to literature and, indeed, propaganda that comes from the Chinese Communist Party and the centralised government in Beijing. That is an accusation that will be made and, I think, already has been made against this. That is the real danger. We can counter that by broadening the curriculum and allowing the facility for more people to learn the traditional script as well.