Setting the Context

The education system was given a central role in the Irish language revitalisation policy of the Irish Free State when it was founded in 1922. One of the key policy initiatives at that time was to introduce Irish-medium education wherever there were teachers qualified and competent to teach through the medium of Irish. The objective of this policy was to educate a bilingual generation of children who would go on to speak Irish and over time revitalise the Irish language. This early policy initiative has resulted in a long tradition of Irish-medium education in Ireland. There have been periods of growth and decline in the number of schools teaching through the medium of Irish during the intervening years. The last 40 years have seen a period of sustained growth in the number of all-Irish schools, driven in the main this time by parental demand rather than by state initiative. Currently, there are 43,130 (7.97%) primary pupils (aged 4–12 years) receiving their education through Irish in the Republic of Ireland (RoI) with a further 5,854 (3.41%) in Northern Ireland, giving an overall figure of 48,984 (6.87%) for the island of Ireland (www.gaelscoileanna.ie). The remainder of pupils attend mainstream English-medium schools and learn Irish as a core subject. This all-Irish school movement is viewed by many as one of the most positive enterprises in language promotion in the history of the state (Council of Europe, 2008). Despite this growth in interest and popularity, objective evidence about the proficiency in Irish of the pupils who participate in these programmes is sparse and the contribution of this movement in enhancing the number of people using Irish on a daily basis outside of the school environment has not been adequately explored.

Research findings from a number of studies by Harris (1984) and Harris et al. (2006) that focused on all-Irish primary school pupils demonstrated the very positive impact of Irish language immersion. These studies indicate that all-Irish pupils significantly outperform their peers in English-medium schools in terms of their ability in Irish.