Scots Wikipaedia

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

Kevin myers is hardly a neutral observer. He is a highly partisan commentator with a major political axe to grind who is not above at the very least misquoting if not downright fabricating statistics to support his cause (He hates the Irish language amongst many other things).
I have direct personal experience of both the UK and Irish education systems and the Irish secondary-level one (in it's present form, I only left tertiary level education 6 years ago) is superior.

For get about Kevin Meyers-- that's not the subject at hand, no matter how much you may wish to disparage him. Take off the rose coloured glasses and look at the hard facts: Only about 12% of the Irish population can be considered as "literate" in the Irish language despite having spent at least an hour a day, for twelve years, "learining" the language in school. Sure he may have a few words of social Irish, but the average 30-something couldn't fill out a DSS form, or pass the written portion of the Road Test in Irish, if called on to do so. Worse, almost a quarter of those leaving school today can't fill out those forms in English without assistance. If, as you say, the secondary education system where you live isn't as good as the Irish system, all I can say is God help you. Your schools must be turning out a generation of dolts.

But here's the whole point of it.

Like it or not, for political, cultural, or economic reasons we are English speakers, and it does no one any good to have schools turning out students who are unable to function in the real, work-a-day world, in English, especially when that bit of their education is given short shrift because of some lofty-- although possibly misguided-- "nationalist" ideal. Whether we are talking about Scots, Lallans, or Irish, the bottom line is this: it doesn't matter how good--or bad-- they are in that language. If they can't read, write, and comprehend English, they are going to be doomed, if not condemned, to the lowest end of the social scale.