Ray D'Arcy

So why are people trying to avoid Irish at all costs to the point where they're going off to get a diagnosis?

Well, there's a letter by Clare Greeley

to the Times today and she says, Sir, it's not today or indeed yesterday we have read about the increasing numbers of secondary students seeking exemptions in Irish.

Why is the number far greater in this subject than in any other languages?

The answer is very simple, says Clare.

It's a mixture of both the prescribed material that is to be taught in the classroom coupled by an exam that is far more demanding and arduous on the student.

The situation could very easily be reversed by bringing the Leave and Cert exam in Irish into sync with French, German, Spanish and Italian, whereby the emphasis is on the communicative – don't get me to say that again – the communicative aspects of the language as opposed to the heavy-weighted paper on literature.

As a teacher of Leaving Start Irish for the last 35 years, I acknowledge that there is a beauty and worthiness in both Irish poetry and prose, but let those areas be examined as a separate subject in the same way as English is examined in the A-level system, i.e.

English language and English literature, separate subjects.

A simple enough remedy to reverse the current demise.

Clare Greeley, Ratgar, Dublin 6.

And I know the Irish-speaking community are buoyed up by the kneecap phenomenon, as some people are calling it, on Colleen Kuhn, etc.

And it looks like that our language is enjoying a purple patch.

However, if Levenser students are...

being exempted from it for whatever reason, that's not, in the long term, that's not good for the language.

I remember being envious of a guy who came to our primary school from England and he had one of those exemptions.

His name was David and he never had to do Irish.

And it wasn't that I didn't like the language.

It was, as everyone, you know, as everyone says, it was the way it was taught and we had buntus cointe and all that sort of thing.

It just seemed...