The teaching of Irish in the republic’s schools is a stunning example of systematic failure. According to Sean O Cuirreain, the Irish language commissioner, the average school-child endures 1,500 hours of tuition as Gaeilge over a 13-year period, yet emerges with nothing more than a few words, soon forgotten, and a heartfelt dislike of the language they have been force fed.

Not surprising, then, that O Cuirreain says that there is a widespread “lack of ability or fluency in the language . . . among so many employees in the public sector”, which “is a matter of no little concern to me, especially in the light of the investment which has been made in the teaching of Irish in the educational system of the country”.

He estimates that the cost of teaching Irish is €500m a year and wonders whether the state is getting value for money. Quite rightly, he wants a “comprehensive and impartial review of every aspect of the learning and teaching of Irish”, and wants to ensure that children leave school with a “reasonable” fluency. “This is essential if we are serious about promoting Irish in every aspect of national life, including public administration,” he says.

Well, here’s a thing, Sean: we’re not. As a society we are prepared to pay expensive lip service to the Irish language, we are happy to force our children to waste their time learning it in a way that has demonstrably failed, and we are happy to indulge a few other tokens, such as subsidised Irish language television and radio stations and the often-garbled cupla focal at the start of major speeches by our political leaders. But in no way are we serious about promoting Irish in every aspect of national life. Nor should we be.

The abject failure of government policy since the creation of the state has meant the number of Irish speakers collapsed from about 250,000 to 20,000. According to a report two years ago, the number of Irish-speaking families with children at school in counties Mayo, Cork, Waterford and Meath was just 53. Throughout the entire Gaeltacht regions there were just 2,143 families with school children who were using Irish at home.

This, then, is what more than 80 years of independence, 80 years of forced learning and faux regard for the ludicrously titled “first official language” has delivered. What is most astonishing, though, is that even now our politicians do not want to recognise the policy for the disaster that it is, and so we continue to clutter up the school curriculum with an approach to Irish that is a waste of time and money.

The Irish language, as all the statistics reveal so grimly, is effectively dead and it is impossible to believe it can ever be resuscitated. O Cuirreain’s role as a language commissioner is as much a nonsense as the Official Languages Act that brought his post into being.

In his first year, O Cuirreain has handled just over 300 complaints from people who have been upset by their failure to get a bus pass or a speeding ticket or a reply to a letter in Irish. Some had more serious issues — speech therapy for Irish speakers is almost nonexistent, though it is not exactly prevalent for English speakers either. But most of the complaints border on the irrelevant.

Dealing with them, however, is far from irrelevant. Under O Cuirreain’s leadership there will be a rolling programme of compliance with the requirements of the languages act across every public body in the state. Every significant publication will have to be produced in both Irish and English, and to the same standard. Those who hope to reduce costs by producing a monochrome translation of a glossy annual report will be slapped hard by O Cuirreain.

Public bodies will have to ensure that they employ enough fluent Irish speakers to provide a full alternative service for those who want it. They will also, O Cuirreain says, have to produce a “language scheme” when requested to do so by the Department of Gaeltacht Affairs. Almost 40 of them, ranging from the office of the president, to the director of public prosecutions, Dungarvan town council and the Department of Finance, have until the end of this month to submit their schemes for approval.

And all for what? To ensure, presumably, that the rights of the tiny number of people who speak the language — fewer than half the number of immigrants who come to this country each year — are not trammelled. The policy is mad: it involves an inestimable expenditure of time and money so that the romantic and flawed notion of a bilingual nation can be maintained.

Ireland is not bilingual. We are an English-speaking nation, have been from the moment we gained independence, and were for a century before. Nothing O Cuirreain does will change that, and neither will anything in the Official Languages Act. Far more serious, though, is that nothing in the current policies will help preserve the language. If preservation had been at the heart of government policy for the past 80 years, rather than the moronic policy of indoctrination, then Irish could be in a far healthier position today.

The objective now must be to direct what resources we can afford at helping it survive in those few pockets of the country where it still flickers. This can be done by abandoning the policies that have so marginalised it for generations.

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