Should Irish be made optional at schools.

'If you want to make Irish optional, then you need to make another language mandatory.'

Why?

Ireland is not France or Germany. The Irish people

decided over 100 years ago to speak English a large part of out population is not born here ,everyone can speak English how many people speak Irish everyday at home at work imagine looking for a job that does not involve being fluent in English

Wales is similar everyone speaks English only a minority can speak Welsh

I thing young people need a good education in

Maths languages science history I think Irish should be voluntary after the inter cert in the modern world studying french or German would be more useful to a student we are in the eu

Irish has very little practical value in real life no more than being good at Irish dancing is of use when looking for a job

When you are at school there's a limited time to spend on learning homework etc We need more students who are ready to go into the building industry carpentry electricians

Irish has little practical value in real life outside school unles you are a schoolteacher

How many actually speak Irish after leaving school I'd say very few

I'm more interested in what people say I don't think you become a magical genius just because you can talk to to someone in Irish

and most people can't understand what you are saying after you say conas a ta Tu ?

An idiot who speaks in Irish or English is still an idiot

I'm not saying people who want to should not study Irish and I think it's part of our culture

Oh, I'm not saying they should make the decision - I'm just saying their opinion should be taken into account. Otherwise, what's the point of educating them at all...?

In any case, I'm in favour of no mandatory subjects for the Leaving for reasons you can find on previous pages of this thread.

Irish people learn a second language every single day from age 4/5 for thirteen years yet fail spectacularly to realise any benefit from it, whether in that language or in any others.

It must greatly pain the neo-fascists that even the highly conservative Ireland of 100 years ago was not prepared to contemplate that level of totalitarian oppression against its own people.

I ignored Irish in class put no effort into it as I see no benefit in it ,I can understand the benefit of learning French ,German ,Spanish ,you can use a modern language as part of your job, there's no Irish person who does not understand English ,it's more like a hobby like birdwatching ,you can travel to France or germany and talk to people in the native language

Irish is a cultural relic ,very few people speak Irish everyday at home or at work

One of the reasons the Irish economy is booming is we all speak English which happens to be the international language of business

I do not think the quality of Irish teaching is great eg most people can hardly speak Irish after 5 Years of learning it

Irish politicans are reluctant to change the education system if there's a chance of losing votes even if the system is pointless or old fashioned

Just make learning Irish voluntary eg pick Irish as part of the subjects you learn or maybe choose computing french etc instead

Eg something more relevant to modern Life or useful in the world of work

Did you see the benefit in punctuation?

Why does language have a 'special place?'

If say, Irish dancing or Irish trad music, were made mandatory subjects there would be resentment if either of those had all the spontaneity and fun sucked out of them, were made compulsory, force-studied by those who couldn't give two fcuks about them to pass an exam, and were never going to use them in adult life.

Give those who want to learn it the opportunity to do so and let the rest in peace.

and where the hell are the teachers going to come from?

Schools can't find science, maths etc. teachers for instruction through English never mind Irish.

No I didn't. By international standards we're still very poor at foreign languages. But most English speakers have no incentive to become fluent in another language.

The few who move long term to a non-English speaking country do, but even then an increasing number of companies use English in the workplace anyway, and in social circles with people from many backgrounds English is often the common language. So it's quite possible to live in a country and get little chance to practise your local language skills.

We spend an absolutely massive amount of time, effort and money on Irish and we get practically no return for it.

I hated every second of Irish in school. Delighted to see the back of it after the leaving cert. Make it optional.

Well, in fairness you ARE trying to force a personal cultural preference onto an entire nation via rule of law at the expense of personal choice (although I personally would agree it's a long way short of "neo-fascism", it's not exactly freefom-of-thought orientated either).

And lets not forget you used the phrase " colonial inferiority complex of our chattering class" so you're not exactly innocent of exagerated bullshit yourself :)

100 percent it should be made optional

And do you know why its not? Because if it was, next to nobody would take it on.

Nobody, bar a very small few can actually speak and understand it. Having a few words here and there doesn't mean you can speak it. The census figures are not at all a true reflection on the level of fluency of Irish on the island.

Simple, most people will know very very few people who they would describe as somewhat fluent in Irish. I know of a few people who went to Irish speaking schools and none are all that useful as regards fluency

Pointless waste time and resources and money.

Years and years wasted on people forcing it, and nobody can speak/understand it

And it doesn't make you less Irish (whatever that means) to think this

And Ireland today is not Ireland from years ago. We are full of all different nationalities.

I didn't do Irish for the leaving. I'm probably one of the very few Irish people who didn't. I was born in the UK but started school in Ireland. However in the middle of primary school my family moved abroad for a couple of years. So by the age of 11 I'd forgotten all my Irish and was back to square one. This meant that Irish was my worst subject. I barely passed it for inter/junior cert (I was the last year to do the inter). I passed by memorizing grammar without even knowing enough words to string a sentence together. Because I was born in the UK I didn't need to do Irish to get into university. So I asked if I could drop it and do another subject. Initially I was told yes. However after a week I was told I couldn't. Apparently the school got additional capitation based on students that did Irish. So I had to drop my other subject and return to Irish. As a compromise I had to sit at the back of the class bit could study whatever I wanted and didn't have to actually participate in the Irish class. I was registered for the aural, oral and written exams but it was communicated beforehand that I would be a no-show. And on my results there's just a dash next to Irish.

Would I like to be able to speak Irish? yes. But I don't think anyone in my year, especially the ones who did pass Irish, had any level of fluency. The pass class were only doing it because they needed it for college.

Yup. In fifth and sixth class in primary, the first hour of the morning was spent in a general class discussion in Irish about anything and everything - the latest episode of the Bionic man, McDonalds opening it's first outlet in Ireland, whatever, and we were all keen to talk.

Going into first year secondary, our teacher said that she'd start from year zero and assume we didn't know anything. Big mistake.

Then 'Peig' happened.

In all honestly, I was more fluent in Irish coming out of a Primary education than I was my Secondary education. Why? Because there wasn't the 'bata-fada' and there was less pressure.

Irish should be taught optionally and made more 'fun'. Take the f*cking exams out of the equation for starters. Make it more of a social experience for students.

For those who argue it's part of our cultural identity, it's a really hard argument to make considering that it hasn't been a language spoken en-masse for around 200 years, and we've kinda done OK with our cultural identity in the meantime.

I would have thought that was obvious?

To get children fluent in Irish from a young age so they can stop worrying about it and just enjoy it.

It should be optional.

no reason that students should spend hours of study on a subject / language that 95% or more of them will have no more use for after they stop studying it.

Jeez, even an extra couple of PE classes would be more beneficial as at least it benefits health of the students.

since leaving school over 20 years ago, I have not had a singular moment in my life where I needed the Irish language. Never uttered a singular syllable of it, never read a document just containing Irish alone and never spoke with a person who spoke Irish but not English…

I’ve had a reasonable use for my French which I studied and became reasonably proficient at. I holiday in France regularly and have lived and worked in France for a time..

literally studying the social behaviour of ‘farting goats’ for all that time as I studied Irish would have as much benefit to me as all that time learning Irish.

studying Irish should not be compulsory in second level education.

A Department of Education report shows that in 2016 almost 9,500 students did not take the Leaving Cert Irish exam out of a total of 58,500 Leaving Cert students… probably valued the study time be given to more worthwhile and important subjects. So 16.23% of students didn’t show up for that exam.

Exactly how likely do you think the language will die out completely if Irish is made optional? I mean, the inference here is that NO-OINE actually CHOOSES to learn Irish, which I find difficult to believe. And if it was true - that the only thing between Irish and extinction is mandatory LC Irish - it brings me to my next point...

... if people are willing to do it ten years after they leave school and if kids aren't allowed the choice: why not flip the argument and make it mandatory for adults to learn it, too? WhyJUST the kids?

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Also: just to reiterate: I'm in favour of mandatory irish for primary schools - and possibly for Junior Cert. Not Leaving Cert. At some point, you have to accept you;re just wasting peoples' time.

Is it true that you need honours Irish to become a teacher?

Definitely up there with the crackpot notions of all time.

We certainly do have a serious shortage of good teachers, and doing away with the requirement that they be able to teach Irish, in Irish schools, isn’t going to do anything to improve that situation, it’s only going to make a bad situation worse.

I think you’ve missed the point of the education of the nations children, which isn’t just to prepare children to be able to function in Irish society, but it is to prepare children to contribute to Irish society as adults, some who may even be inspired to become teachers themselves.

(just don’t tell them the conditions of employment are shìt and they’ll be bogged down underneath a mountain of bureaucracy… ‘vocation’ makes teaching sound more valuable to society than it is in reality where the Irish Government are really getting incredible value for what we spend on education)