Look, I’ll be honest: I’m not sure the need to speak Irish is what’s causing Ireland’s teacher shortage. If I were a betting man, I’d be more inclined to take actual teachers at their word, and say that the problem is the need to be able to afford rent in Dublin and elsewhere, which teaching salaries just don’t cover:
Irish requirement for teaching training a barrier to a diverse workforce – @AodhanORiordain
“The need for Higher Level Irish at Leaving Cert level jars with other mandatory subjects.
👉 https://t.co/2rw7YT8iVh.. pic.twitter.com/u9ahKm8jkX
— The Labour Party (@labour) December 11, 2022
Labour – like literally every other political party – has no immediate solutions to the housing crisis because none exist. So, it’s probably helpful to focus on some other problem, like, eh, the Irish language and diversity.
There are two elements of this Labour idea that one might conceivably take issue with – the obvious one is the language, but we’ll come to that in a second. Let us begin instead with the notion that “diversity” itself is a desirable outcome in the teaching profession, which should be pursued in and of itself.
The Irish definition of “diversity” is pretty much the same as it is everywhere else in the western world – it just means “more people from minority ethnic groups, and more gay, lesbian, and transgender people”. In this instance, the Irish language requirement presumably makes qualifying as a teacher more difficult if you were not born in Ireland, and did not take the Irish language at leaving certificate level. It is not, therefore, a barrier to gay people, or people from minority ethnic communities who were born and raised here – it should be no barrier to travellers, for example, or second-generation immigrants from minority ethnic backgrounds who have had a full Irish education.
My colleagues Ben and Fatima (we don’t get any credit for it, but in terms of the ethnic backgrounds of our workforce, Gript is the most diverse Irish media employer) would have no impediment to becoming teachers, for example.
We are left, then, with a very small sliver of the population indeed – first generation migrants who did not have a full Irish primary and secondary education. So, the scale of the problem O’Riordáin proposes to address is not very big at all.
There’s a big question here though about who it is, exactly, that education is supposed to serve: If you are a parent, do you prioritize your school having good, committed teachers, or do you, on the other hand, prioritise your school having teachers whose sexual orientation and ethnic backgrounds full represents the rainbow nation that Ireland’s establishment so desires us to become?
If you ask a parent, I suspect the answer is “good teachers”. If you ask a left-wing politician, or one of the hundreds of state-affiliated NGOs, I suspect the answer is “more diverse teachers”. The service users don’t care about diversity, and very rarely do. Politicians and NGOs care about little else.
This is true too, by the way, of ethnic minorities: Go ask an Asian parent whether they want their child taught maths by a good teacher, or an Asian teacher. Perhaps the optimal answer might be “good Asian teacher”, but any parent, of any race, is going to pick “good teacher” over “teacher of my ethnic background” every time. This is also true, by the way, of almost every white Irish parent.
The entire concept here is off. It’s just a soundbite, designed to appeal mindlessly to the people who nod at any mention of “diversity”, without ever considering whether they want diversity in their own schools, or whether they want quality.
As to the language issue itself, it seems perfectly reasonable to even me, the westiest and most anglophile of hated west brits, that a country should have a vested interest in promoting and sustaining its own culture. The Irish language is more inherent to Irish culture than literally anything else – it is the one thing found here and here alone in the world. It is also the language of our great myths and stories and legends, as well as having cultural and historical significance due to its almost total eradication during the long years of Union.
There’s another element to this which is not simply about the language – if you think of the leaving cert Irish course, if you did it, then you might realise that it is not so much a course in the language itself as it is a course in Irishness and Gaelicism. That’s one of the reasons, I’d argue, that fluency rates are so low. The course is supposed to steep you not in the language (that’s a mere by-product) but in the culture – the poets, the stories, the yarns, and so on.
It is clear, even if not always spoken aloud, that the Irish state, through the education system, wants to produce graduates who feel an affinity for the country and its Irishness. And, by and large, I think this is one thing the system does well – we are a very patriotic people, and that starts in the education system.
The state then has a legitimate interest in maintaining in that education system a culture of Irishness, and a recruitment policy that targets those steeped in it.
O’Riordáin would toss all that out, for the sake of recruiting from a very small pool of recent migrants, and in order to prioritise a quality in teachers that parents do not even want. It is a typical proposal from his party, and might go some way to explaining their lowly standing in the polls.