The real wonder of the recent report by the Irish language ombudsman was not his "revelation" that our education industry is failing grossly to teach Irish to an overwhelming majority of pupils, writes Kevin Myers.
No, the truly astounding feature was that his findings were treated as an utter revelation, as if up until that moment we had all firmly believed that our business and our television and newspapers and the Dáil and our law courts all operated successfully in the first national language.
Yet now he tells us that we haven't been speaking Irish as we all thought? And what? On average, by the time they leave school, students will have spent 1,500 hours being taught Irish but not learning it? Oh ombudsman, you amaze us! You astound us! This is like hearing that Trócaire is a money-laundering front for Texas oil cartels, or that the Little Sisters of the Poor secretly manufacture poison gas for North Korea.
Now, it is just possible that I have referred to the mythical, mystical role of the Irish language in the life of this country before. In doing so, I have endeavoured to tell some of the obvious if unpalatable truths about the reality of the position of Irish: my certain reward has invariably been vicious, vitriolic ad hominem abuse - which is perhaps why so few other people are ever prepared to discuss the actual position of Irish in this country.
For the overwhelming majority of pupils in the Republic of Ireland, the time spent learning Irish is wasted: which could be bad enough, if we were otherwise educating our children properly in the three Rs. But the report Literacy and Numeracy in Disadvantaged Schools confirms what most of us already knew: that we are facing an educational catastrophe. One quarter of students in such schools have severe literacy difficulties; and in the worst schools, 50 per cent of the pupils can't read or write. Or, put another way, compulsory Irish language enables them to be illiterate in both English and Irish.
Moreover, if, as already had been reported, 25 per cent of all school-leavers are functionally illiterate, some heroic areas will have to make up the numbers for areas such as Foxrock and Sandycove, which have 100 per cent literacy. And where you have high levels of illiteracy, you will get high levels of truancy, and of course, reluctant or even non-existent teachers.
The time spent teaching tens of thousands of children a language they loathe and will never use in their lives is unquestionably part of the problem. But there is another factor, and that is diet. If you want to assure yourself of an assured and steady income, open a fast-food outlet near a secondary school. Because, perhaps uniquely in Europe, our secondary schools essentially abandon responsibility for their pupils during lunch-breaks, and instead of being given a balanced and responsible diet, already overweight teenagers each day waddle off to gorge themselves on vitamin-light, vegetable-free burgers, chips and pizzas.
And as for those students who are illiterate: a pound to a penny many of them are overweight. Moreover, they are almost certainly suffering from diet-related behavioural problems which compound the difficulties they are already encountering at school.
The British television chef Jamie Oliver recently made a series of eye-opening programmes about the appalling food served in London schools, which essentially have nationalised the burger joints outside Irish schools. Thus the obesity problems that we have here exist in full measure in Britain also. One doctor spoke of child patients whose diets consisted of so much fat and carbohydrate, with no vegetables or roughage, that their bowels had congealed into a solid, unmoving and immoveable lump. The result? Children vomiting their faeces.
No doubt the same delightful phenomenon is happening here. So, our chronic educational failings are being given a horrific new dimension with a simultaneous dietary crisis. We can turn our back on this as always, and pretend it's not happening: an Irish solution to an Irish problem. In other words, we are creating, at huge expense, an assembly line of obese and socially dysfunctional illiterates, of only marginal economic use - though they might have some use as extras in horror movies about the invasion of Monstrous Martians. Unable to learn any lines, they could lie about the set breaking wind at one end, and at the other inhaling animal fats like an industrial-sized Dyson.
This is good news for our immigrants, who yearn to get ahead while the locals yearn only to get a couple more chins and to fart.
There's a key here. It's called choice. Do teenagers have the right to decide on what food they eat? Well, actually, no, not in a responsible world. They probably know more about politics than they do about dietetics, but we don't let them elect governments. So why should we allow them to decide the lifelong mental and physical condition of future generations of voters? By allowing callow teenagers to choose what they're going to eat, that's precisely what we're doing at the moment.
An awesome challenge lies ahead, far vaster than anything touched by Mary Hanafin's €40 million for disadvantaged schools announced yesterday: it is the State-wide introduction of compulsory, zero-choice school lunches.
Otherwise, ahead of us is a station called Obesity Central, and the only train waiting there is the one departing for Barking Lunacy.