A new report warns the high volume of children receiving exemptions from studying Irish is denying them a part of their identity and culture, and is out of sync with how other European states go about teaching minority languages.
This week’s report “From Exemption to Inclusion”, written by Pádraig Ó Duibhir, professor emeritus at Dublin City University, was commissioned by Conradh na Gaeilge.
Mr. Ó Duibhir reports exemptions at primary level are “relatively stable” with just over 2% of students receiving one in the 2024 cohort, while exemptions at secondary level have risen by almost 5% in seven years (now 60,946 individuals).
He says this trend is heading in a dangerous direction as by 2030 more than one in five post-primary students will not be studying the native language.
The report also challenges what it calls the “presumption” a child with a learning disability cannot learn a language, as a number of those who have received an Irish exemption in recent times went on to study a foreign language at post-primary level.
Midwest Radio’s Rowan Kelly asked Pádraig why this is the case…
