Unsatisfactory progress in Irish

Dear Editor,

Hooray! for the Irish education system. It's seems they've invented a time machine. No, sorry, actually it should be called a time warp.

I'm a Transition Year student and on Friday, December 8th, I reminisced about "the good old days" in my primary school as we went over the irregular Irish verbs for (literally) the trillionth time. The appalling thing was we needed to. At this point, primary school teachers' jaws right across the country are probably wrenching themselves from their sockets and plummeting to the floor as brains think in unison: "But didn't I just finish beating that into my third/fourth class today?" Well they'd be perfectly right in doing so.

The pitiful truth must now be told. I'm sorry to say it but you're teaching has unfortunately been futile. You see when you make that tiny hop up into secondary school the standard of Irish drops right back to just above beginner's standard. In my four years since joining this "higher" institution the Irish has barely even dared to challenge the standard I was at in sixth class. In my recent Junior Cert (one of the other pathetic constituents of the education system) I got a B on the pass paper. Now, the irony is, and I have no doubt about it, that if I answered that paper while in sixth class I could have gotten an A on the honours paper, easily.

It's a disgrace that the Government has the cheek to impose the compulsory teaching of a virtually extinct language like Irish and then just ignore it when it comes to actually designing a method of teaching it, since the current Irish course is one of the most basic and boring compared with something like French. I can only hope this standard improves dramatically before my Leaving Cert or else I'll have to re enrol in my old primary school. Yours,

Rockfield Avenue, Perrystown, Dublin 12.