Time to dump Irish

To be fair, they do - under idealised conditions. But there is no way Irish education can be calle even adequate, let alone ideal.

One thing that never fails to amuse me in these discussions: everyone - reguadless of how much they love or hate or are indifferent to the langauge always agrees on one thing: that the education syllabus/policy is disgracefully bad.

And yet, forcing kids to do it is seen as a nessecary idea...?

It's a school subject, not a language. It shouldn't be, but it is.

And a long as the vested interested parties are in charge nothing will change. Why the genuinely passionate Irish speakers who want to see the langauge thrive aren't fighting tooth and nail to get rid of them, i don't know. None of them seem to know how to achieve what they really want.

That's the major problem with the way Irish was taught here for years, especially in my time. Poor kids trying to get their heads around transitive verbs, as gaeilge, but also being expected to write a treatise on how crap it was to live on an island 100+ years ago and watch half your children die.

It's not taught purely as a language, which is the way it should be. Instead it's drummed into kids as some sort of quasi heritage obligation with a smattering of third rate history.

How I managed to get a D in it still stuns me to this day.

Either does Welsh or Cornish but Wales and Cornwall cherish with pride. Need to be thought better though

Ahhh to clarify... You maintain that whoever teaches Irish is either:

1. Brain-dead retarded fuckwit.

Or.

2. On the take .

Did you go to a gaelscoil? Lots of children in Ireland go to gaelscoileanna despite the fact that their parents don't speak Irish at home, and in some cases not at all. Four and five year olds don't start primary school with an agenda, they just get on with things. They don't view speaking Irish as a chore, because everyone in their school is speaking the language, so it's the norm and they just get on with it. They are in an environment where the language is the primary method of communication and it's a positive environment. They are still getting an education, just through a different language. There is a gaelscoil in my local area, although not in my secondary schools direct catchment, so we don't get a lot of students from that primary school, but any of the ones I've had over the years only had positive things to say about their experience there.

Now you're just projecting. No one was condescending to you here. And no one is suggesting that parents be forced to send their kids to an Irish language school. All of that is just hyperbole on your part.

Also many children around the world grow up not just in a bilingual household, but in multilingual societies where they speak two or more languages. The concept of 'not being good at languages' just isn't there. I don't think Irish people or people in the UK (where some of the same issues exist) were born with a lack of ability to pick up other languages. Speaking English and not being exposed to other languages on a daily basis, and for a lot of our media coming from abroad to be through the medium of English has a lot to do with it.

How do we know a particular language is the language of a country?

For example, how would I go about finding out the language of the people of, say, Austria. One way would be to travel there and observe the language they speak in day-to-day transactions. Having done so, we would probably come away fairly quickly having determined that they speak a variety of German.

For some reason though this does not work in Ireland. To find out what the language of Ireland is we need to consult legal documents. Obvserving what language we use in ordinary life is of no use for some reason.

Understanding this distinction is the key to understanding why language policy has failed utterly in Ireland. We think we can simply declare a particular language as the native language of the country and it becomes so. But of course this is not the case as the last century teaches us.

But it has become to much of an industry. To many people make a living out of this failure for it ever to change.

Our forefathers were speaking Irish long before the invader arrived.

I'm the same not great with languages, i never found them easy but i found maths and science relatively easy. I have never in my life managed to get one of the Countdown conundrums but regularly get the maths element.

In other words, the answer by your logic is 'not English'. Sorted.

In this context, the language a person chooses to speak is their language.

You can't dictate to another person what their language is any more than you can say what their sexual orientation is.