After spending 1,500 hours learning Irish during his or her school career, the average student leaves their cúpla focal at the school gates. Louise Holden poses the question, why, given the time and financial investment in Irish, are so few of us able to use it?

When Sean Ó Cuirreáin, the Irish language "ombudsman", pursued companies to fulfil their responsibilities under the Language Act 2003, a systematic problem came to light.

The offending companies put their cases simply: they couldn't find competent speakers of Irish to translate annual reports or answer customers' letters. There aren't enough decent Irish speakers in the system to fulfil the requirements of the Language Act.

How can this be? The average student spends 1,500 hours learning Irish during his or her school career. The newly-appointed language commissioner has estimated that we spend an annual €500 million on our mission to steep students in the Irish language, yet even those who get an A in the Leaving Cert are walking away from the language at the school gate, barely able to utter a Slán agus Beannacht Libh on the way out.

Nobody is blaming the teachers. For decades a deeply flawed curriculum has held its own against a backdrop of national uncertainty about the role of Irish. Parents are unable to champion the language at home when they themselves doubt its value.

Students are rarely required to use the language beyond the classroom unless they want to become teachers themselves. For the majority of students, the Irish language now exists for the sake of perpetuating its own death grip on the school system. The fresh and living Irish of a Connemara cornershop couldn't be further from the learned-by-heart essays and grammar rules of the classroom, but very few students outside the Gaeltacht get to experience Irish as a living language.

"As we begin to review the teaching and learning of languages in the curriculum, as is happening at present in the NCCA, we may need to come to terms with the idea that the language is not fully teachable within the classroom," says Dr Muiris O Laoire of the Institute of Technology Tralee, who has just completed a study on the teaching and learning of Irish.

The key to effective language acquisition is immersion. Irish students will never be routinely immersed in Irish unless we become bilingual as a nation. Internationally, bilingualism is the norm rather than the exception - in Ireland only 10 per cent of people use Irish daily and only

3 per cent use it as a first language. How can we expect our teachers to produce fluent speakers of a second language in a vacuum?

"We need to go back to the beginning and ask ourselves what we want for the language," says O'Laoire. "Right now, the objective of the Irish syllabus is to get students through the exams. There is very little emphasis on communication. Even where the syllabus guidelines recommend a communicative approach, teachers cannot implement these guidelines because they are not given any training. We are not good at teaching languages in this country."

If the aim of Irish teaching in our schools is to enable students to communicate in their own voice through the language, then a fundamental rethink of the syllabus is required. There are those, like Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, who would consider offering Irish as an elective rather than a core subject. O'Laoire believes a compromise might be the better approach.

"Rather than requiring every student to take the full Irish course and written exam, perhaps we should offer the current syllabus to those students who need academic Irish for the next stage of their education," he says. "For the others, we could design a syllabus that is totally focused on communication and examined orally."

For those who would discontinue the mandatory learning of Irish, O'Laoire points out the wider benefit of learning a second language from a young age. "Learning Irish is our children's first experience of learning another language. Research now clearly shows that bilingualism promotes and deepens intellectual capacity." The academic success of the gaelscoileanna would seem to support this theory.

In Wales, Welsh-medium schools also produce above-average results.

The present syllabus at primary level prioritises communication and could provide a constructive learning model for second level. The new primary syllabus throws away the peann dearg and emphasises expression rather than accuracy. O'Laoire feels that the examination of Irish at Leaving Cert should do the same.

"Right now, a student who accurately regurgitates a rote-learned essay on 'My Favourite Person' will get better marks than a student who really writes from the heart in her own voice and makes grammatical mistakes," say O'Laoire. "We should be looking for genuine expression and the voice of the student rather than a demonstration of the ability to learn language set-pieces."

Here is where the teachers are up against it. A passionate Gaeilgeoir may spend her teaching hours in lively conversation with an engaged and expressive class, but come May the same pupils will be required to funnel their learning into a formulaic and restrictive exam. It's interesting to note that for many years the subject of the decline of Irish has appeared as an essay or comprehension question on the Leaving Certificate exam, illustrating the defeatist retreat of the syllabus from the living language.

"I've been teaching Irish for 20 years and I have never had a decent day of in-service," says Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland subject convenor Robbie Cronin. "The NCCA is trying to bring communicative learning to the Irish classroom, but here is no training for the teachers who are supposed to implement it. An Irish film was introduced to the syllabus this year, but we have received no training is how to teach film studies. It's pathetic."

Reform of the curriculum can only happen when we decide, as a society, where we see the language and then invest adequate resources to bring that vision to fruition. Otherwise we are subjecting many of our students and teachers to a frustrating battle with the language, so that those of us beyond the Gaeltacht can assuage our cultural insecurities.