Sing a song of sixpence...

It's a proud national boast that the Irish are a musical people. That self-image is triumphantly evident in the litany of achievement in every imaginable sphere of contemporary music from U2 and Riverdance, through Daniel O'Donnell and the Chieftains, to John O'Conor and the Wexford Opera Festival. A recent consultants report estimated that the Irish music industry gives employment to around 10,000 people.

Yet there is a yawning gap between national music achievement and the musical education of Irish children, the potential achievers of the future. The 1996 PIANO report on music policy in Ireland warned: "If national levels of literacy or numeracy were as low as the present national level of music literacy in our primary schools, there would be a public outcry."

There is, of course, no such outcry. The reason is that the public - and, therefore, the politicians - do not see it as a problem. The general perception is that the innate musical talent of the Irish, combined with the huge commitment and enthusiasm of individuals and organisations outside the formal education system, is enough to foster the musical potential of our children.

Music teachers and others who believe in the power of music to transform and enrich children's lives could not disagree more strongly. The pianist John O'Conor, speaking as director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, believes there are large numbers of "terribly talented" children whose gifts are going to waste because their parents cannot afford individual instrumental lessons.

There is little point, he says, in setting up his personal dream of a high-level Irish Academy of Performing Arts if "children, particularly at a young age, don't have the musical education leading up to it."

But music in schools is about every child, not just the talented few. The new primary school music curriculum stresses that all children have musical potential; music develops the entire spectrum of a child's intelligence and early music education is crucial both to improving concentration and memory and to developing their self-esteem and sense of achievement.

Regina O'Leary has almost single-handedly made St Canice's national school in Kilkenny the most musically successful primary school in the country - it has three orchestras and 450 of its 560 pupils are learning an instrument. All the pupils have become stronger academically by learning music, says O'Leary, particularly those in the orchestras who have learned the skills of group and teamwork so prized by modern employers.

So why is music education in primary schools so poor? One of the main problems is what Martin Drury, the director of the Ark Children's Cultural Centre, in Temple Bar, Dublin, has called "the relative musical ignorance of the present generation of teachers." Primary teachers, by their own admission, feel ill-equipped and lacking in the necessary confidence to teach music.

The problem lies partly in the way they are trained to teach music in colleges of education. In a 1994 TCD master's thesis, Breda O'Shea, herself a primary teacher who has just been appointed a lecturer at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin, traces some of the factors which have led to the present dire situation: the virtual demise, because of the fall in vocations, of the strong tradition of teaching religious who were devoted to music education; the fact that the introduction of the B Ed course in 1974 actually led to a reduction of time spent on music education by most student teachers; the lack of any proper in-service provision; and, most important, the traditional rule that all trainee primary teachers, however musically illiterate, must teach music.

"Is it fair to expect trainers of teachers to make up for 20 years lack of music education in the space of three years at college?" asks Sean MacLiam, lecturer in music at St Patrick's. O'Shea notes that, as an optional subject, it is often dropped even earlier by many students. "It's difficult to estimate how a year to 18 months of tuition in music could promote a professional lifetime of classroom music teaching," she says. It's little wonder that so many teachers do their utmost to avoid the subject when they arrive in the classroom, or at best reach an informal arrangement with a more musically-inclined colleague to take it for them. "When you're afraid of a subject, because you don't feel properly equipped to teach it, it's not going to be high on your list of priorities," notes O'Leary.

It's difficult to blame the teachers. The new curriculum will add several new subjets to an already overloaded timetable. "There is great pressure to teach a hierarchy of subjects such as maths," says MacLiam. "So where do you put in art and music? They are likely go into Friday afternoon if at all."

Resources are another major problem. Music grants for primary schools are non-existent. Despite the new curriculum's emphasis on the broader skills of listening, composing and performing, singing songs continues to be the only musical option for many schools. Unlike almost every other country in Europe, there is no group of music specialists available to support their generalist teaching colleagues.

Sean MacLiam has a plastic box of tambourines, xylophones, triangles, wooden clappers and other basic percussion instruments in his office. At a cost of around £50, he says, this would be the basic minimum needed to teach the percussion skills now deemed crucial to an early music education. However, very few class teachers would have such a resource.

The new primary music curriculum has been generally praised by those who have seen it. However Tom Toher, director of the Leeson Park School of Music in south Dublin, speaks for many when he wonders about "the large gap" between the excellence of the document and the absence of any real indication as to how it will be implemented.

He says its emphasis on developing children's skills in areas such as pulse, rhythm and melody is "absolutely correct" and in line with the Hungarian Kodaly teaching method which has become influential in many European countries, and which his school has pioneered in Ireland. "Yet, if I handed this to our teachers, all of them professional musicians, they would not know where to start. What will happen to it in the hands of musically untrained primary teachers?"

He gives the example of the curriculum's mention of a repertoire of songs to be sung by young children, without any suggestions as to what those songs might be. He also questions the absence of any guidance about how to draw up lesson, term and annual plans.

Meanwhile, music education in our primary schools is kept alive largely by the huge commitment of individual principals, teachers and outside music bodies. The most outstanding example is probably the National Children's Choir, the product of a personal crusade by a former Department inspector, Sean Creamer, which has seen 50,000 primary children participate in its concerts in the past 13 years.

Anne McDonagh, a primary principal in Swords, Co Dublin, whose daughter is a doctoral music student in the US, sums up the central problem of primary music education. "There are extremely good pockets, but they are completely dependent on individual principals and teachers who have trained as musicians outside the training college system. The Department should realise that we are supposed to be educating children in music, and not just teaching them the odd song here and there."