The Irish language is failing.

Deranged96 wrote: »

I agree with a lot of this, but there seems to be a lot of stick and no carrot.

I think that receiving extra marks for doing your leaving cert through Irish is fair enough, you get 25 pts for passing Higher Maths and their talking about extending that to other sciences, so its nothing privileged.

However, those extra marks in Irish should not be extend to papers that have minimal writing, such as Chemistry and Physics.

Well one of the main points is that we need to get away from the carrot and stick approach to Irish on the basis that this doesn't work.

It might be fair in some respects to award extra points for doing Geography through Irish. But it sends out the wrong message as to why you should be learning Irish in the first place. For too long it has been the language of extra points, university entry, obtaining tax-payer money. This has the effect of orientating it away from being a spoken language.

Someone earlier mentioned a grant paid to Gaelteacht people for speaking Irish. What happened was that inspectors would visit school playgrounds and see if the children were speaking Irish. If they were, money would be paid to the parents.

The consequence of this was that when the inspectors left the children would revert to English. What message did that grant send to the children? If you start associating speaking a language with money or some other artificial advantage you will stop seeing it as a means of communication.

Franco tried to suppress Catalan in the Catalonia region of Spain. He banned it from Schools and all official business was conducted in standard Spanish. But Catalan survived. What he should have done was what has proved successful in killing the language here and provided bribes for speaking the language. Turn it into a "worthy" language that gets you special privileges that have nothing to do with day to day use of the language. Create resentment among who don't speak it and make them dislike it.

Grayson wrote: »

1) Bonus points for maths is ok if it's for a related course. Science etc..

2) Even without that Maths is still hard. Studying it could result in extra points for it. And we'll accept that for now. However studying Irish really well should not result in bonus points for every other subject. You could technically get an extra 90 points for doing exams though Irish. That's hardly fair. Especially when most students won't be able to avail of it. It'll be a reward for the few native speakers. They'll have a huge advantage over non native speakers in the points system.

Its a lot easier to pass higher maths than it is to answer the most important exams of your life through a language that is not your first. And after all, getting an A1 in Higher Irish is not going to get you extra points, you need to show fluency across the board. I think its fair as it stands, though as I said physics and Chemistry should not be included in the Irish scheme.

I'm sure its still awkward answering through Irish for students in the Gaeltachtí, when it comes to vocab for biology and things like that, but a fairer system does need to be worked out. It's shocking that those in the Gaeltachtí follow the same Irish syllabus as the rest of the country. Perhaps if they followed an Irish course that was akin to the English course in terms of difficulty.

Also I find it amusing that my computer wants to correct Gaeltachtí to heartache

Deranged96 wrote: »

Its a lot easier to pass higher maths than it is to answer the most important exams of your life through a language that is not your first. And after all, getting an A1 in Higher Irish is not going to get you extra points, you need to show fluency across the board. I think its fair as it stands, though as I said physics and Chemistry should not be included in the Irish scheme.

But why is this incentive there in the first place? Doing your leaving cert whilst standing on your head is harder than doing it sitting down but we don't provide extra marks for it.

What is so great about people knowing a language they do not speak? If we are not going to speak it how much of it do we actually need? Maybe a "cupla focail" is all that is needed in most parts of the country.

Deranged96 wrote: »

How many people doing Higher maths will ever think about Proof by induction again after the LC? Academic achievement is academic achievement, regardless if you use it later or not.

I would not agree with that. Most subjects have some usefulness. The school system can't predict who will need what skills so it needs to provide a broad rounded education to everyone. But generally there's very little that is totally useless.

You mentioned higher maths. This conversation would not be possible without it. In that sense you are actually using higher maths now when you read this. So it has to be taught.

Whether it should have extra points I don't know but its relevance in the modern world is fairly well established.

Academic achievement is not all the same.

Deranged96 wrote: »

By the same token your using Irish :P

Unless you go on to do a course that has a maths complement, doing your leaving through Irish does have more impact on your life. People with fluent Irish these days raise their kids to be bilingual, or at least to have some bit of Irish in the home- as a poster above has alluded to this is quite a beautiful thing.

Now I am definitely not saying higher maths isn't useful,it certainly teaches critical thinking, just that most people rarely go past basic algebra in their day to day lives.

I don't want to knock Gealscoileanna or the people who send their kids there. But extra percentages added on to leaving cert results in such a way that someone with only 30 percent in a subject will pass sends the message out that Irish is a handicap that needs to be compensated for.

Unfortunately, we had this strange idea that we could have Irish as the official language of the state but not speak it. It was doomed from then on.

We had the chance in 1922. Make Irish the working language of the state. All schools = Irish schools from day 1. After 10 or 20 years, they'd just be schools and you'd have to have special "English schools" if you wanted.

Just look at Hebrew. 150 years ago is was a dead language that some old religious books were written in. Now there are people who can only speak Hebrew - so it's perfectly possible - we just decided not to do it.

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

And realistically it's for the best that we didn't..

As a small island nation that relies almost entirely on foreign trade and investment, we've done pretty well out of being a native English speaking country over even the UK.

If we were speaking Irish as the first/primary language I think we'd still be mired economically and culturally somewhere in the 50s TBH.

My personal opinion is do it right, or don't bother. We have the incredulous cheek to force the European Commission to translate key documents into Irish when we don't bother to speak the language ourselves. We had the chance (which I think we should have taken) but now the ship has sailed.

It's an oft-toted assumption that our economic progress is/was dependent on being native English speaking and that had we been primarily Irish speakers we'd somehow be backwards. This doesn't make much sense to me. There are many thriving non-English speaking countries, small ones too - why would we have been different? I think this opinion stems from our national inferiority complex. We could be speaking Irish and have very high levels of proficiency in English and enjoyed the same success... but a different type of success.

All that said, if we had have taken the parochial GAA type stance and prohibited speaking of "foreign" languages the same way we did "foreign" sports, we'd certainly be in the dark ages today.

Mind you, in my opinion we're not there yet. We voted in gay marriage but your non-Catholic child in your local state funded school has to sit in the corner while the rest of the class prepare for a religious sacrament... and that's if they got in at all... that's scandalous in my opinion.

BobMc wrote: »

Only recently come across this thread, so only read last couple pages, but I'll go back a bit further when time allows, My own current experience is with my son aged 11 in 5th class, he struggles with irish, and will probably always do so, my wife and I just discussed this the other day and the effort and time he'll need to put into just being able to get by in irish is possibly going to affect his attitude to general study going forward.

I'll quote some round numbers, say he studys maths for 5hrs per week with homework etc and gets average to above average grads, but to just get by in irish has to put in 10 hrs a week, how can we justify putting that amount of pressure on him just get a pass grade with the chance he's so pissed off at all the study that other more important subjects suffer.

Dont have the answers but as a family at the moment we're very dissillusioned with the whole prospect of how and its detriment its taught

I struggled with Irish too. I am an Engineer by profession and got a D in pass Irish in the leaving cert while doing reasonably well in everything else. So I only barely managed to avoid having to repeat solely on account of Irish.

There must be a problem with how the language is taught. I don't have an intellectual disability that I know of but they managed to "teach" me Irish for 14 years and yet I come out the other end of the system barely able to put a sentence together!

Somehow, it's taught as a cultural obligation, not as a language. You must appreciate the literature of misery and suffering rather than learn a language to communicate and express.

It's all ar$eways. In principal, I think we should have kept our national language but what we have now, we're better off without.

Edit: I just remembered a primary school teacher we had who would use Irish as a threat. She would say: "SILENCE! Or it'll be out with the Irish books.". I swear I still have nightmares about the Buntús... this horrific event in school where the teacher would project some image onto the wall which featured a picture and some keywords in Irish. If you got picked on by the teacher, you'd have to make up a sentence. What a horror that was. I lived in perpetual fear that I'd be chosen.

LordSutch wrote: »

Good post that, and I will be in the same boat in the coming years with my kids.
We are seriously thinking of just letting Irish go by the way side while concentrating on the other core subjects! Dunno how this will work out in practice but we're willing to give it a go (depending on circumstances). So if there's a complaint from the teacher, then we will have to rethink our stance, but if it just means that young Johnny gets an f in Irish while doing really well in English, Maths, French, Geography, etc etc then that's a good result.

I totally see where you are coming from, but I think you will be doing your child a disservice here. There's no way out of having to learn the language that I know of and you still have to pass to get into uni. Lack of support at home will just make it so much more difficult. When I needed help with my Irish homework my dad would just go off on a rant about how we shouldn't have to learn a dead language. But what good did that do me?

di11on wrote: »

I totally see where you are coming from, but I think you will be doing your child a disservice here. There's no way out of having to learn the language that I know of and you still have to pass to get into uni. Lack of support at home will just make it so much more difficult. When I needed help with my Irish homework my dad would just go off on a rant about how we shouldn't have to learn a dead language. But what good did that do me?

Thats what we're trying to avoid also. My wifes irish is poor to say the least and 20yrs since shes been at school, worse from my side as i've zero Irish as I grew up abroad so never did it in secondary. I'd love to tell him screw it, just work hard on the others, but I do think complacency would creep into other subjects too

Firstly Irish is a very difficult language to learn because it is not based on a Roman-Greek root as is English. Secondly, compulsion is a direct legacy of DeValera who was a delusional fanatic. Thirdly, no political party has had the courage to say enough is enough.
Even 'Renua' took on a pseudo Gaelic sounding moniker - so much for liberalism.
A change will come in time - why not put it up to the politicians. ?

recipio wrote: »

Firstly Irish is a very difficult language to learn because it is not based on a Roman-Greek root as is English. Secondly, compulsion is a direct legacy of DeValera who was a delusional fanatic. Thirdly, no political party has had the courage to say enough is enough.
Even 'Renua' took on a pseudo Gaelic sounding moniker - so much for liberalism.
A change will come in time - why not put it up to the politicians. ?

It's hardly very difficult to learn, there are only 11 irregular verbs and the system of sounds is much more consistent than say in English. There are some quare grammar points but nothing as bad as the subjunctive in French.

It's just that the curriculum is diabolical altogether and there's no continuity between Irish at primary level and Irish at secondary level, leaving students to regress in the language if their teacher isn't capable

Dr_Bill wrote: »

I can categorically state having gone through the eduction system from the age of five until eighteen and endured 13 years of the subject that the Dept. of Education nurtured my disdain for the language. Why anyone should have been made to study Peig is beyond me, nearly made me want to jump off a cliff too have to read through the crap.

I did however learn perseverance in the knowledge that once I left school I would not have to study the subject ever again. Fortunately I found English and French to be infinitely more useful in my professional and personal life.

The Irish language should be optional to study in school at secondary level.

There are two types of people who study Irish at leaving level.

Those that want to and those that don't.

Those that don't want to won't learn anything. They'll study what they need to learn to pass an exam and won't learn anything else. Since they'll never use it outside school, they'll forget it all.

It should definitely be optional for leaving. If someone doesn't have an interest in it by then, they'll never have it and those two extra years will just nurture a dislike of it.

A few points made above call for some comment.
* Gaelic is a dying language. It's not just the view of people in the street -it's a view held by linguistic researchers and by the revival lobby itself. If a language is not dying -why would anyone be trying to 'revive' it ? Gaelic has been on life support for quite a while now.

* It's being taught in universities abroad. Of course it is but what relevance has that to daily life in Ireland ?
Scholarly types are interested in all kinds of extinct languages from biblical times down. ..e.g. Hittite ,Old Church Slavonic.
No one is arguing against the academic study of Gaelic. Non-scholars also study languages to a certain (limited) level for curiosity or personal eccentric reasons. This is totally removed from a language being used by an entire population for their important personal and public transactions.

* Someone actually made a statement along the lines ...'it (Gaelic) could be easily revived'. This is almost comical in its naivety. Anyone making a statement like that is simply not au fait with the complex of issues involved in the Gaelic revival.
It is a statement of spectacular gormlessness and I'm afraid this poster must be left to stew in the seething cauldron of their ignorance.

* Someone else tries to suggest that the cost of honouring the insane designation of Gaelic as an official language of the state is not that significant. No official attempt has been made to supply accurate trustworthy figures -I wonder why ? The Gaelic lobby is as usual shifty and duplicitous when asked about this. In one breath they say it's not very much at all -then in the next breath they say ,well, even if the cost is considerable the revival is worth persisting with no matter what the cost....but then the fact that they are the chief beneficiaries might explain that particular stance.
The cost must be vast. One would have to total up the various cost of all the grants and subventions since the 1920s.
These would include ,inter alia,
-training teachers
-subsidised textbooks
-the various grants (deontaisí) to designated Gaeltacht areas alluded to earlier in the thread .i.e. housing , money to households taken /deemed/to be Gaelic speaking. Think about it -bribing people to use their 'native' language! Much of this money was dishonestly
and fraudulently acquired .
-Maintaining a special government Department of the Gaeltacht with all the bureaucratic entailments
-maintaining inspectors for Gaelic in the Dept. of Education
-paying for books to translated into Gaelic the vast bulk of which ended up unread or mouldering in the basement of the GPO.
-Duplicating signage all over the place
-Doubling the cost of advertisements in newspapers national and local.
-Doubling the cost of all official forms e.g.tax, driver's licence etc.
-Doubling the cost of supplying information brochures and booklets to all the households in the land -paper, design, translation , printing, distribution, disposal. This alone must be enormous as we're talking many hundreds of pages of unreadable drivel sent over the years to around 1 1/2 million households on glossy coloured paper with many illustrations.
One can readily see that the cost is huge. All unnecessary ,all waste. , all sad and silly.
Virtually everything to do with the Gaelic revival is phoney and based on unreality.