"Some students have lost the language and the language has lost them". So said the Minister for Education and Science, Mr Martin, commenting on the Junior Certificate results, which show a fall of 13 per cent in students awarded a grade C or above in ordinary or foundation-level Irish over the last two years. He is to set up an expert group to study the issue, observing that it is "essential in the interests of maintaining Irish as a living language that we ascertain the root cause of this decline". There will be, it is to be hoped, no shortage of people advising the group on why standards, as measured by the Junior Certificate, have fallen and what should be done about it. Mr Martin took an important initiative last week by endorsing a curriculum reform for primary schools, including a "communicative, task-based approach" encouraging children to use the language orally in everyday life. He has also removed the requirement that secondary teachers should pass an Irish test, unless they use the language in their everyday work.
That very word, everyday - laethuil - together with everyday life - gnathshaol - are key factors in explaining why there is such an alienation of students from the Irish language. The way they encounter life has little to do with their encounter with Irish. The language is administered in doses of compulsory, bureaucratic, grammar-based and exam-tested pedagogy which take up a lot of curriculum time, with far too little visible reward or identification with the wider Irish culture. Teachers and pupils complain endlessly about the curriculum, yet little has been done about it by successive ministers. Mr Martin is right to put the issue centre stage. It is not that the wider Irish culture has been going through a prolonged decline. On the contrary, it has rarely been so vibrant - and in many different spheres. Nor is it that Irish identity no longer requires the buttressing that the language alone can give it - in an age of globalisation there is a powerful counter-movement of localisation and differentiation which should provide bountiful opportunities for linguistic renewal.
The gaelscoillanna phenomenon clearly includes a great deal of sheer enthusiasm for the language, quite aside from the improved pupil-teacher ratios it brings in a strongly competitive educational system. Sceptics should note well one of the strongest but insufficiently expressed competitive advantages Ireland enjoys in the monoglot English-speaking world: a second language makes it easier to acquire a third or a fourth one. That this could be a vital advantage in coming years is generally recognised; but equally, Irish is usually seen as an obstacle not a resource in this respect, either because it competes for curriculum time or is seen as irrelevant to this country's European vocation. Neither of these propositions is necessarily true. There should be room for other languages in the primary curriculum as well as Irish and English - if the principal objective is to achieve and sustain oral proficiency at an early age. And the Irish language remains a vital part of this country's identity. The debate about compulsory Irish will not go away and cannot be avoided; but it should be seen in this wider context now that Mr Martin has put it on the public agenda.