Why I wrote my son’s Irish essay for his Leaving...
ON the basis that it wasn’t actually illegal and that the statute of limitations has probably expired now in any case, here’s a confession: I wrote my son’s Leaving Cert Irish essay. Every word, every fada, every séimhiú was mine. The story he opened with, about him being on a train and hearing a man making horrible racist remarks about Leo Varadkar? That didn’t happen to him, it happened to me. And all the rest: sentiments, opinions, DNA. Mine.
It was a last-minute intervention. My son, like the vast majority of Irish people, had spent 13 years learning Irish. And like a great many others – and to my regret – he hated it. Worse, he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. He had done the ordinary-level exam for Junior Cert, but his canny teacher convinced him and me to upgrade to higher level for Leaving Cert, on the basis that under the new grading system, a mark of 30% to 40% at higher level carried more points than a mark of 70% (which he hadn’t a chance of getting anyway) on an ordinary-level paper.
But as I worked with him on his oral exam, it was clear to me that the poor lad hadn’t a focal. Grinds didn’t help: aimed at getting H1s – that’s As in the old money – for high fliers, he might as well have been plunged into Mandarin at the 11th hour.
So, on the Saturday before the exam, a friend of his was advised by her grinds tutor that ‘somebody who knew somebody’ said that 2017 – the year that was in it – was going to come up as an essay title. Doubtful but desperate, I did what any mother with decent Irish would do: I sat down and wrote a short essay in simple, clear but correct Irish, including enough general issues to allow it to be shoe-horned into alternative titles. I went through it with my son, explained what it all meant and jettisoning every other bit of Irish study, for the next 36 hours, he learnt it by heart.
And 2017 did come up. And he did very well in the exam – much better than anyone (apart, maybe, from me) expected. And that should be a good story, but it really, really isn’t.
BECAUSE that’s actually a story about what I believe is the abject failure of the way Irish is taught in schools; a familiar indictment of a system that, as we all know, exposes us to a language for more than an hour a day for 13 or 14 years – and that very, very few of us can speak more than a few words of afterwards.
On Monday, the Mail revealed that the majority of students exempted from studying Irish on grounds of learning disabilities study a foreign language.
The report prompted Junior Gaeltacht Minister Seán Kyne to say that children with exemptions from studying the national language need to be banned from studying other languages as well – a response so astoundingly shortsighted it beggars belief. Surely the Minister – and everyone charged with teaching Irish – should see this revelation as simple proof that parents will go to extraordinary lengths to save their children from what they see as wasting their time learning a language they have no interest in – and rather than penalise those students, use this uncomfortable information to address everything that is wrong about how Irish is taught. Because clearly, the current system is not working. And for a system that doesn’t work, it does indeed waste an inordinate amount of time.
I loved Irish in school and loved it more for the single year I studied it in college. Over the years, I have done enough evening courses in Irish to decorate my kitchen with my certificates (that I am not more fluent than I am is indicative of just how astonishingly complicated the language is; far more so than easy-peasy French, for example). Even my phone is in Irish.
But it is glaringly obvious to me that Irish should not be a compulsory Leaving Cert subject. It is equally obvious that if it were made optional, only a minority of students would keep the subject on after Junior Cert. I also reckon that the number of exemptions for reasons of learning difficulties would also mysteriously drop.
Far from wounding the fragile beast, making Irish an optional Leaving Cert subject could invigorate it. It would mean small classes full of pupils who actually want to be there, who are invested in the language and its preservation. It could make immersive Gaeltacht courses possible in term time and it would mean that instead of most people leaving school with very little Irish, some people would leave with very good Irish indeed (the rest would still have very little Irish, since they’d take it to Junior Cert level).
I spent 13 years in classrooms with people who didn’t want to learn Irish and I have spent about seven years in classrooms with people who did. I know which was the better experience. I know where I learnt better Irish.
Let students learn French and German and whatever they’re having themselves. And let the ones who want to learn Irish do so in an environment that encourages learning and love of the language, where nobody slams books on desks and shouts over teachers about pointless dead languages. It could be the greatest service we ever do our children and our national language.