Minister for Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív has acknowledged that a radical review of Irish language teaching in schools is necessary.
However, in a debate with Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny in Galway at the weekend, Mr Ó Cuív said there would be no change in Government policy in relation to Irish on the Leaving Certificate curriculum.
Mr Kenny has suggested the subject should be optional after the Junior Certificate. Significantly, Mr Ó Cuív said it was "farcical" that English and maths could be dropped after Junior Certificate, while Irish could not.
"Most parents ensure that their children don't drop English and maths, which is why we don't have a debate about it," Mr Ó Cuív said, during the debate hosted by the university's Cumann Eigse agus Seanchais and Conradh na Gaeilge on the Irish language budget.
There was an urgent need to undertake a radical review of Irish language teaching, he said.
"Irish reflects a unique heritage, and a world heritage which we hold in trust," he said. "It is only right that every child being educated in Ireland should have the right to be taught both languages in the first and second level systems."
There had been monumental mistakes in relation to Irish tuition, but it was not the abysmal failure that had been portrayed.
Some one million people said they knew Irish, and 100,000 said they spoke it daily, according to Census figures, and the growth in Gaelscoileanna showed that there was a continued demand for language tuition.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said his proposal on optional Irish for the Leaving Certificate was only one part of a wider plan by his party to review the teaching of Irish. The Irish Language Commissioner had referred to a cost of €500 million for teaching Irish, but a significant number of students had no command of the language.
"I genuinely believe that we have to have a national audit of the language, encompassing value for money, and we need to set realistic proposals for its future." Yet there was much "hypocrisy", with only two Irish language inspectors in the State to cover 700 secondary schools, 100 Irish-speaking children in Connemara who had no access to speech therapy in their mother tongue, and no one in the Dáil secretariat capable of answering a letter in Irish.
If fundamentals at primary level focused on oral, rather than written, Irish and if there was a radical review, children might want to continue the subject after Junior Certificate, he said.
