Irish as taught in schools is suffering from a bad case of the cultural heebie-jeebies. This year's Junior Cert results confirm what the dogs in the street have known for quite some time. Decades of being given financial and academic priority have failed to improve Irish literacy levels to any notable degree. Whether they are beaten over the head or given 10 per cent extra points for fluency, successive generations have not taken Irish to their hearts in anything like the way they could reasonably be expected to do.
Irish is not a particularly difficult language, or at least no more than, say, German. We even have a head start in learning it because its cadences and rhythms seep through the English language in everyday life.
So why are students finding it an unpalatable tongue? Something has gone badly wrong, and at the worst possible time for the culture at large. The Minister, Micheal Martin, talks about it as a kind of loss. But the loss is not a matter of nostalgia or of a failure to live up to the ideals of the early State.
The loss is a real one because it concerns imagination and identity. And judging by the Junior Cert figures, we've mistaken Irish identity for what it is not.
Some 100 years ago, when hardly any published texts in Irish existed, Prof J.P. Mahaffey of TCD made his infamous assertion that Irish was not a proper language. So, a core part of the language movement's early mission was to prove him, and others, wrong. Irish would be turned into an academic language with the same power as English, French or German: one of the top priorities was to get material written down.
In its early days, An Gum went so far as to commission Irish language translations of European classics by such as Balzac or Dickens on the basis that the Irish language would shine when presented in this common academic currency. Native speakers such as Peig Sayers and Micki Mac Gabhann were interviewed and written up as though their words could constitute classic Irish texts.
This was equivalent to making sows' ears out of silk purses. Irish had never been an academic language because it had never been an imperial one. There was no one canon, no academy that decided who spoke "proper" and who did not. The written text was not the highest form of cultural expression known to man: Irish was oral, it had many different canuints and there was more than one way to go about speaking it. Its best expressions provoked poetry, sport, folklore and fairytales, and much music. It was in a sense a post-modern language long before the term was coined. But the dead hand of controlling, standardising educators could not see it that way.
Irish was burdened with the legacy of those early educators and stripped of the contexts which could allow it make sense. At least then it had the aura that accompanied being part of a young, emerging State.
NOW, the burden survives into the current Junior Certificate system through the complete absence of any oral component in recent exams and through what look like highly inadequate teaching methods which lack the ability to motivate students and get them excited about what they learn.
No one tells students that the dialogue between Navan Man and the Drunken Politician each night on Today FM is a near-perfect example of a light-hearted agallamh beirte, where each speaker must seek to best the other in a contest of words.
No one encourages them to have the same fun with the Irish language. Instead, the language is presented, shorn of its culture, as a system of grammar and vocabulary which should fit their experiences and must do so at all costs. No wonder so many find it so dull.
Even at university level, there's no way a student will be able to explore how writers as different as Samuel Beckett and Mairtin O Cadhain were investigating the post-war world in similar ways at exactly the same time - one in The Unnamable, the other in Cre na Cille.
My generation was administered Irish the way we were administered cod liver oil. Although I can remember inspirational teachers in French, Latin and English, I can't recall the name or face of even one Irish teacher at second level. Nothing made it or them stick because there was no context for them to stick to.
Irish was compulsory, we failed our exams overall if we failed it, and naturally we resented the area because the rules were unfair. The only literary models we were given were old women or brash young heroes. In an urban, all-girls' school, such models had no resonance whatever.
The system has changed: coercion is gone and some of the best-looking people on TV speak Irish. The Gaelscoileanna movement is the fastest growing first-level educational phenomenon. You'd think we'd we reaping the benefits by now. So why aren't we?
The most recent census indicates that more than 10 per cent of us think we can speak Irish, which shows how much goodwill remains despite the educational failures of the past. Preparing for the future may involve introducing Irish Studies to the curriculum in a manner wider than today's narrow linguistic focus.
BUT the question is whether the fragmented, plentiful Irish language and heritage sector is capable of self-scrutiny, and of understanding why there is a whole new rationale for making Irish matter now. Some inter-agency co-operation exists; so too does intense rivalry.
In the efforts to establish who owns Irish, real opportunities for the language and what it expresses are squandered. Unless Mr Martin and his colleagues can rationalise institutions across the board, and reimagine Irish as if for the first time, we can expect Junior Cert results to continue to decline.
Somewhere in our various psyches, we seem to sense how important it is to keep the language and to grow it because we value the imaginative framework it employs. Gaeltachta apart, we need to make a new deal for Irish. The aim of bilingualism has failed demonstrably in mainstream schooling: supporting Gaelscoileanna in their ongoing experiment is the best hope for delivering that end.
Texts are important - and with poets such as Cathal O Searcaigh, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and others, they are more alive than ever. But broader, inter-disciplinary approaches, from music and story-telling to sport and debate, might make more sense than focusing on grammar all day long. We're facing an agallamh beirte that will force us to tease out the edgy issues between going global and being ourselves - whether we want to or not.