FG conference: Students should have the choice to stop learning Irish after the Junior Cert as compulsory teaching is harming the language, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said last night.
Warning that the future of the language was "in trouble", he said most students leave second-level without "any reasonable command" of Irish even though they have received about 1,500 hours of tuition.
Meanwhile, thousands of Leaving Cert students do not even take the Irish paper in their final exams, said Mr Kenny, who was speaking in Cork on the eve of the party's national conference in Millstreet.
Mr Kenny called for the development of a national plan that would support and encourage Irish for all.
"Our education system is failing Irish. I want Irish to flourish in every home, classroom and playground, and for that reason we must reform how we teach it," said Mr Kenny, a former teacher and a fluent Irish speaker.
"Compulsion is a blunt tool. Forcing students to learn Irish is not working, and is actually driving many young people away from any real engagement with this beautiful language," he told Fine Gael members in Cork City Hall.
Urging the abandonment of compulsory Irish after Junior Cert, he said: "Those who decide to continue will share classes with those who want to be there learning Irish, rather than those who wish they were somewhere else, learning something else.
"We need to build from now, not from the past, in a new agenda to support Irish. Irish is part of who we were, who we are, and who we will be. I want to save Irish.
"We must acknowledge that compulsion, as the political engine to revive the Irish language, has failed," said Mr Kenny, who will address 3,000 Fine Gael members today.
Irish should be taught far more as a spoken language in classrooms - "a living language of modern communication" - in a way that will develop "a genuine love and appreciation of the language".
The call by Mr Kenny for an end to compulsory Irish after Junior Cert has been in gestation for some time. He warned last March that pursuing "existing deficient policies" would not build a strong language.
Urging a major review, he said then that approximately €500 million was spent annually on teaching Irish to little effect in the case of tens of thousands of pupils.
The review should "consider whether we are doing more harm than good to the language by forcing unwilling students to complete Irish to Leaving Certificate level", he wrote, in an article for The Irish Times.