Primary schools would devote up to 120 minutes extra per day to teaching literacy under a Labour proposal unveiled today.
The party's policy would also require school principals to produce specific literacy plans, and to provide regular feedback to parents on their child’s standard of literacy.
Education spokesman Ruairí Quinn said one in 10 primary school children – some 50,000 pupils - had serious literacy difficulties. That figure rises to one in three in disadvantaged areas.
Mr Quinn said literacy levels had not improved in the last three decades, despite a “massive increase” in expenditure across the social spectrum, including in education. He said ordinary schools would focus about 90 minutes of their teaching time each day across the existing curriculum, whether through drama or poetry or history or geography, to literacy issues.
Teachers would in this way pick up on the "ability or inability of pupils to match their literacy skills with their learning skills".
Labour's wider education policy would give principals "autonomy and leadership flexibility" on how to apply the policy as not every one of the 3,200 primary schools in the country was the same.
Principals would decide in consultation with teachers how best to incorporate literacy into the daily curriculum. "It doesn’t cost a lot of money – it requires a refocus.”
He insisted the policy could be adopted within the existing school day.
Mr Quinn said former Mountjoy prison governor John Lonergan had repeatedly stated that the “vast bulk” of inmates in the prison had one thing in common: that they could not read.
“We are going to make literacy a national cause. Dublin is the city of writers - Unesco approved. And one third of working class kids are illiterate. We pride ourselves on our great literary tradition. We have excluded 10 per cent population from even understanding, let along comprehending, that tradition.”
Mr Quinn said the plan was “a statement of intent” that Labour would not allow the situation where one in three students in disadvantaged schools was illiterate to continue.
“Overall child literacy rates in Ireland have not improved since 1980, despite more investment and smaller classes.”
Almost one in six 15 year olds here do not have the literacy skills to cope with further education or the demands of today's workplace, Mr Quinn said, citing a 2009 OECD skills survey. He said this made tackling literacy problems in schools even more urgent.
“Literacy is the foundation on which education is built. If we don't get that right, all of our subsequent investment in education is compromised.”
The party wanted to ensure that no child leaves an Irish school without being able to read and write.
The party’s spokeswoman on social and family affairs Roisín Shortall said high levels of illiteracy were associated with low skills, early school drop out, high levels of dependency on welfare, high unemployment, poor health outcomes and, in particular, poor mental health outcomes.
Labour's policy would have agreed national outcomes and specific targets for disadvantaged children and young people, as recommended by the National Economic and Social Forum report Child Literacy and Social Inclusion.
That policy aims to reduce the proportion of pupils with serious literacy difficulties in primary schools in disadvantaged communities to less than 15 per cent by 2016.