Sir, – I sat the Leaving Cert in 1996, the son of an immigrant father and a Dublin mother, neither of whom had a word of Irish. I scraped through pass Irish and went on to UCD, a family first.
My children have since given and received an extraordinary amount of classroom time to Irish.
Now my son faces a choice that makes no educational sense. Either keep spending scarce hours on Irish and French because the NUI universities require them for entry, or drop them completely and focus on the subjects where he can excel.
If he drops Irish, he rules himself out of UCD, UCC, Galway and Maynooth before anyone looks at his application, points or potential.
RM Block
That is a stage gate, not an education policy.
I want Irish to flourish. But decades of compulsion and prescribed texts, have produced few confident speakers and a great deal of quiet resentment. My suggestion is to turn it around, into an aligned incentive. Award bonus CAO points for Irish, as we do for higher maths.
Put spoken Irish at the centre. Make fluency and use the goal.
And stop using language subjects as barriers to unrelated degrees.
Our children deserve better and so does Irish. – Yours, etc
SHARIF BOUKTILA,
Clonskeagh,
Dublin 14.
E
