In the Seanad on 5th April 2006, on a private members motion on the teaching of Irish, I said:

The debate echoes what I said some years ago when we debated the Official Languages Bill in this House. I remind Members that I was one of the very few people - perhaps the only one - in this House to speak against that Bill. I opposed that Bill not because I was against the Irish language, but because I am in favour of it. I argued then, and I still believe now, that the Bill diverted money and attention to the wrong place. The attention and the money should be directed to the area addressed by the motion, and that is the teaching of the language in our schools.

In the debate on the Official Languages Bill, I asked given that our young people learn Irish from their first day at school, why can so few people speak it? Why do so few adults wish to speak Irish in their daily lives? How do we fail our children and the citizens of the nation and what must we do to succeed in engendering in them a love for the language? On that occasion I drew attention to the massive State apparatus devoted to the teaching of Irish, which went back to the 1920s. In spite of that apparatus, the vast majority of young people do not learn the language effectively. A large number of young people leaving school do so not just with a lack of enthusiasm for the language but also with a negative attitude to it. The current system of teaching Irish has failed miserably to engage the majority of the population.

Why have we failed so badly? It is not that Irish is a particularly difficult language to learn and it is certainly not that we have failed to devote enough time or resources to the teaching of Irish. There must be some other reason for this monumental failure to achieve the objectives we set down for ourselves, but which we have not reached. How can we ensure that we will achieve what we are setting out to do? I argued then many of the same points that are being revisited in this debate. I said that we would be far better off investing in research to find out what we were doing wrong in the teaching of Irish in our schools than spending vast sums of money on translating documents into Irish that nobody would read.

I got the Competition Authority report - two big, thick and glossy documents - today. I do not know how long it takes to translate such documents into Irish, or the length of the delays which arise for that reason. I suggest that time has proved me right because the costs of implementing the Official Languages Act 2003 have caused a national outcry. That gives me no pleasure because it has helped to bring the Irish language further into disrepute. I welcome one consequence of the passing of the Act, however. The inaugural annual report of the Office of An Coimisinéir Teanga, published on 14 March 2005, states:

What more is there to say? We do not have an infinite amount of time to continue to dither about this issue.

The case for the language becomes weaker and the voices speaking against it become stronger as further generations of young people emerge from school unable to speak Irish. We are fortunate that enough goodwill towards the language remains to enable us to mount a final rescue operation. We need to make a final effort to undo the damage we have been making since the foundation of the State. If we do not take this opportunity to face reality, the time may soon have passed when it is possible to do anything about it. That day may be closer than many of us think.