Scots Wikipaedia

[thanmuwa]

According to Kevin Meyers in today's Irish Independent 23% of Irish school leavers are functionally illiterate. The forced feeding (and that's what it is) of the Irish language is considered to be a major factor in this failure of the educational system. Far better, it would seem to me, if those five weekly hours of Irish were replaced with teaching basic reading, writing, and math skills.

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.

I agree that Irish is taught terribly (there aren't words to describe how awful the teaching of Irish is in general... for a start, imagine learning grammar by rote for 6 years with no conversational lessons at all!), but the other core subjects are taught to a level equal or above, for example, the equivalent in Northern Ireland. (Northern Ireland is acknowledged as being top across the board in the UK for education, based on school results.) This is based directly on how my Irish second-level education compared with Northern Irish students in the same degree programme in Queen's, Belfast. In Maths for example they were still coming across new concepts that I had already done in school until at least halfway through our first year.

Students attending all-Irish schools are further disenfranchised by the fact that many of their text books are in English, whilst the lectures are delivered in Irish. That school leavers from Gaelic schools receive a lesser education is proved by the fact that they are given a 10% "bonus" on their leaving certificate scores for taking the examination in the Irish language in order to assist them in qualifing for placement in Irish universities.

I love the way you deliberately put two unlinked items in a sentence in such a way as to imply a link that doesn't exist. You may not have been a politician (I don't know) but you certainly picked up a few tips on politician speak! The Gaelscoileanna (Irish speaking schools) are a much more recent invention than the bonus points for doing exams in Irish, the bonus points weren't invented to get educationally sub-par Irish speakers into Uni as you imply. The bonus was a failed way to encourage Irish, the Gaelscoileanna (which started up about 50 years afterwards, they are a recent phenomenon) are what is looking like a successful attempt to encourage Irish. Which is incidentally what kevin myers has a problem with.
Your implication that Irish speakers need additional help to get to University is just plain false. Getting results of the level to allow you you to go to Uni means that you got little or no bonus for doing your exams in Irish (they are awarded on a sliding scale - top results (i.e. Uni level) = no bonus).

There is another major advantage to the Gaelscoileanna apart from the obvious preservation of a language that was the first modern European language to be written down, and the language of the people who almost alone were responsible for preserving Western European Christianity during the Dark Ages.
Students who grow up actually speaking Irish tend to have a major advantage in that they can read, write and think in two distinct languages. Being a duoglot is a strong stepping stone to becoming a polyglot. You go into a shop in Dublin and the fictional Dublin guy behind the counter will speak one language - English. You go into a shop in the Connemara Gaeltacht and there is a good chance you will get by in French, German or Spanish. To put it another way, the Irish people I know with fluent Irish (and English obviously) to a man/woman have at least two other fluent languages, and a smattering of several more. Surely polyglottism is to be encouraged rather than looked on with suspicion?