Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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530. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of students in Irish medium schools in the Gaeltacht regions in Donegal who did the Junior Cycle Irish exam (T1 exam); to provide a breakdown of the number of students which received a result of distinction, higher merit, merit, achieved and partially achieved; and the number of students in these schools who took the Irish exam. [55452/25]

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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531. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of students in Irish medium schools in Donegal outside of the Gaeltacht areas which did the Junior Cycle Irish exam (T1 exam); to provide a breakdown of the number of students which received a result of distinction, higher merit, merit, achieved and partially achieved; and the number of students in these schools who took the Irish exam. [55453/25]

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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532. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of students in non-Irish medium or Gaeltacht schools in Donegal who did the Junior Cycle Irish exam (T2 exam); to provide a breakdown of the number of students who received a result of distinction, higher merit, merit, achieved and partially achieved; and the number of students in these schools who took the Irish exam. [55454/25]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 530, 531 and 532 together.

My Department does not gather or retain data that would facilitate the requested comparisons. Crude comparisons of academic performance alone can be very misleading for students, teachers, parents and communities. Such comparisons are likely to provide an unbalanced and limited indication of a cohort’s overall performance. There are many different factors which feed into a student’s education and generally my Department does not identify particular cohorts of students in order to compare their State Examination results against those obtained by another cohort of students.

The provisional Junior Cycle examinations results were published recently by the State Examinations Commission (SEC) for all subjects and are available online at examinations.ie/statistics. In the provisional results for the 2025 examinations, 8.8% of the 2,581 candidates who sat T1 higher level Irish and 6.3% of the 95 candidates who sat ordinary level T1 examinations received a distinction result, while 8.3% of the 32,293 candidates who sat T2 higher level and 7.1% of the 23,898 candidates who sat the ordinary level T2 examinations received a distinction.

The Deputy may wish to note that on 22 April, I announced changes to the Junior Cycle grade bands. This has resulted in higher levels of distinctions and higher merits across the subjects in 2025. However, the bands remain sufficiently broad to ensure that students can focus on learning and engaging in school, and on becoming independent, resourceful and confident learners, rather than focusing solely on examinations. It is vital that students, their learning and engagement remains at the heart of Junior Cycle.