A chara, – Barry Walsh (Letters, August 5th) states that successive governments have failed abysmally to promote the growth of the Irish language and have actively damaged it by maintaining Irish as a core subject in schools.
While I agree that successive governments have failed to promote the growth of Irish, most especially by its effective exclusion from the workings of the State, I fail to see how less Irish in the education system will lead to more Irish outside of it.
One need only look at the disastrous situation in England since the Department of Education and Science there allowed schools to make languages optional at GCSE level.
There has been a dramatic reduction in the number of students choosing languages since this decision, from 78 per cent in 2001 to 58 per cent in 2005, with languages now being a minority pursuit only bolstered by their being compulsory in some, usually fee-paying, schools.
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The most common reasons cited as factors affecting pupil uptake of languages in England are option-blocking with languages set against other popular subjects (for example, against biology for a student wishing to study medicine or physics for a student who wishes to become an engineer) and languages being considered as harder subjects.
Were Irish not a core subject, the same result would occur here with regard to the number of students studying Irish, and some schools would stop teaching Irish altogether. – Is mise,
DÁITHÍ MAC CÁRTHAIGH,
Baile Átha Cliath 7.
