A telephone poll carried out on behalf of Foinse [an overhaul of that website is long overdue lads!] shows the public is split over whether or not Irish should be a compulsory subject in schools.
The poll revealed [registration cheat] that 65% of people under 34 think that Irish should remain a compulsory subject but support drops to only 26% for those over the age of 34. The positive support for the language doesn’t surprise me at all, it’s in line with what we saw before, but what does surprise me is the poor support in the over-34 group as I would have thought that people’s attitude to the language softens a bit over time. Still ‘over-34’ is a large group and no doubt opinion is fairly mixed amongst them.
Foinse article [in Irish].
Perhaps the over-34s feel less positive about the Irish language education they received than the younger crowd?
Or, perhaps, the younger folk want their slightly-younger peers to suffer just like they did?
(In the US, when the topic of school uniforms comes up, it seems like those who just graduated school are always the ones who are the most vocal supports. I suspect they’d have been singing a different tune if they were still in school…)
(On a completely unrelated note, could you give your posts about the Irish language the technorati tag “gaeilge”? grma)
Hi Nicole,
I think attitudes have become more positive in general in recent years, less politics involved perhaps.
Wrt tags, all Irish related blogs are put under the category of “gaeilge” but I don’t know how to give them a technorati tag. I’ll check it out though and see if I can do it. Edit: never mind, a simple plugin was the answer.
Thanks for the tag…that way it shows up in my feed reader(which I have look for anything technorati-tagged-gaeilge)…
How succesful is this compulsory education though? I was reading in a Scottish paper this week that despite the official figure of over a million Irish speakers the number of people who actually use it on a regular basis as a community language could be as low as 10/20,000. Thats probably very similar (or maybe even lower than) to Scottish Gaelic which isnt compulsary here.
Domhnall, it depends how you define success
Personally I believe that Irish being compulsory had helped the language so far. If it wasn’t compulsory I think the language would be a lot worse off today and I think if it is made optional in schools it will die a fast death. That’s my opinion anyway.
Yes it’s not doing well as a community language but where Irish, Scottish Gaelic etc can do well is as a second language. I think it’s important therefore that kids learn the language in school from as early an age as possible. If kids become fluent early on (thro. Irish medium education) then it won’t need to be compulsory. IMO.