Ni hao! Guten tag! Bonjour!

So what's going on?In a surprise move, Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn has hinted that the foreign-language requirement for students entering third level could be scrapped.

And there I was thinking we need to boost our languages skills We do – more of which anon. In the interim, Quinn says the foreign-language requirement “may need reconsideration in the light of the economic imperative to encourage more students to study the physical sciences in senior cycle”.

Could you translate that for me, please?Essentially, we need more students taking sciences and related subjects at Leaving Cert and in college. Any impediment, such as the language requirement, must be removed as we head towards the shining city on the hill also known as the Knowledge Economy.

But is the language requirement really acting as a barrier?That's a good question. In recent years all NUI colleges, including Maynooth, UCD, UCC and Galway, have dropped the foreign-language requirement for those taking science and engineering. There is little to suggest that this, of itself, is boosting student demand for these courses. At TCD, Irish meets the "foreign'' language requirement. DCU, UL and the 14 institutes of technology have no specific language requirement except for courses where a language is a key component. That said, a foreign language is still required for virtually all courses in NUI colleges.

Back to my question about our need to boost our language skills. How bad are we?In a word, dreadful. When the the US multinational Hewlett-Packard recruited hundreds of multilingual graduates in Dublin last year, most of the jobs went to foreign candidates. This week, a survey of major employers found widespread dissatisfaction with the language skills of our graduates.

Why are we so bad at languages?There's no mystery there. Most students in Ireland take up a foreign language for the first time when they enter secondary school at age 12 or 13; by this stage most of their counterparts in other EU countries are already well ahead – even fluent – in a second language. The lack of any oral component in Junior Cert foreign language exams compounds the problem. It should all begin much earlier, of course, at nursery or primary school. But just 15 per cent of primary-school children take a modern European language – and only in fifth and sixth classes.

But at least things pick up in secondary schools, where speaking French is de rigueur?Not quite. French accounts for about 70 per cent of all foreign-language teaching at second level. But this dominance owes more to history than to economic realities. It was the subject of choice when modern-language study was introduced, in the 1960s, but today our export markets are in countries other than French- and English-speaking ones. Ruairí Quinn would like a stronger emphasis on languages such as Chinese and Russian, which are seen as key to economic growth. But this is an aspiration rather than a commitment.

How do we know that?Because he was careful to talk about the existing budgetary framework – code for saying no can do until the debt burden is lifted.