When I reached the age of four and it was time for me to start school, my parents discovered to their dismay that places in the local school were oversubscribed and there was no room for me. Fortunately, there were places available in an all-Irish school close by and I attended that school for just three years before transferring to an English-medium school. This proved to be a formative experience for me that gave me not only an excellent basic competence in Irish but also an interest in and enthusiasm for the language that I have carried throughout my personal and professional life.

Having gained a qualification as a primary school teacher and taught for a number of years in a school where Irish was a core subject, I got the opportunity in 1985 to teach in a newly established all-Irish school. Scoil Chaitlín Maude was established as part of a relatively new vibrant movement where parents were leading the demand for education through the medium of Irish. During 14 exciting years as a teacher and principal I faced many challenges with excellent colleagues in meeting the educational needs of the pupils. There was a dearth of policies, guidelines, materials and resources that we now take for granted to guide us and aid us in our work in immersion education. As teachers, we created all of these things incrementally, drawing encouragement from colleagues in other all-Irish schools. It would be fair to say that our pedagogy was very much practice driven rather than research driven.

The all-Irish school movement has continued to grow from strength to strength since that time. Part of the strengthening of the sector has been the greater body of research that now informs practice. One of the frustrations for me and my colleagues as teachers was the non-target-like output of our pupils' Irish despite up to 6000 hours contact with the language in primary school. This output manifested itself in particular in deviations in terms of sentence structure and idiomatic phrases.