Learning it at primary school is the best way to grasp Irish, writes Michael Wardof St Colmcille's Community School in Dublin

A third-year student leaves his English class, where he has just gone over the techniques important to answering a personal- response question. He goes into Irish class, where he is given a sample answer to an aiste, or essay question. His personal-response skills are not needed here, as the teacher tells him to go home and learn the sample answer by heart, so he can reproduce it in an exam.

This is the case in an awful lot of all-English secondary schools. Irish is perceived as a subject purely for the purpose of exams. It is not right to say that many teachers do not bother to teach their young charges our first language. What must be understood is the difficulty of this task when the Irish curriculum has already failed many students.

To get to the route of this problem we must backtrack a few years. Apart from those who grew up in Irish-speaking households, students who attend school on the first day of junior infants have little or no Irish. The purpose of primary school is to give them the firm foundations needed to learn Irish. Very often, however, these foundations are not strong enough.

Primary-school days pass, and Irish is taught sometimes for as little as 15 minutes a day. Then these students go into secondary school, where they are expected to be able to create intelligent sentences so as to argue their

opinions about, say, a poem or short story.

I go to school with many people who hate Irish. Why? Because they failed to grasp it on their first attempt. The irony of this is that, at 13, they are expected to learn a foreign language when their only experience of learning a new language up to that point has culminated in failure.

It's fine for people with a natural grasp of learning languages. I was lucky: I went to a Gaelscoil for primary school. As well as receiving the same education as other students my age around the country, I came away with a decent grasp of Irish. This was a huge asset at secondary school. Learning off a sample answer wasn't necessary when I could construct my own without losing too much sleep. It also gave me confidence to learn a third language.

This begs a question: should all primary schools be Gaelscoileanna? These early years are often said to be vital in laying the paths for our future wanderings. If every student came into first year with a firm grasp of Irish, then maybe our national language could be taught as something other than a foreign tongue.

I watched the students around me who had not attended Gaelscoileanna struggling to learn Irish. The aimsir caite, or past tense, was explained and re-explained to my Irish class in first, second and third year. It was a grammatical feat I was already subconsciously aware of from my days of hearing Irish everywhere.

Languages cannot be memorised as if they were quotes from Shakespeare or a maths theorem. Languages are absorbed only through immersion. This is why Gaelscoileanna and summer Irish colleges are such gems. Nothing could be more effective. Students don't learn properly through failure.

As the sean fhocail, or proverb, says: Mol an óige, agus tiocfaidh siad.

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