Minister for Education Mary Hanafin is to examine whether the requirement for honours Irish at Leaving Cert level is stopping men entering the teaching profession.
Ms Hanafin told the Dáil she had no plans to change the compulsory Irish rule "as it is important that people should learn their native language at all levels of the education system".
She said that "a teacher will teach Irish as a basic language that is a part of the school day, and it is therefore important to have a proficiency".
She was "not sure that someone with a pass Irish qualification would be competent to teach it as a major subject throughout primary school. I do not know whether this is affecting the male intake, but I will examine the issue."
Ms Hanafin sais she believed the lack of men in teaching had more to do with them not actively choosing teaching as a career. "The lack of status men afford to teaching has much to do with the dearth of men", but a report on attracting men into primary teaching was due in a few weeks.
During education questions, Labour's spokeswoman Jan O'Sullivan said the OECD average for male teachers was 20 per cent, while only 10 per cent of teachers in Ireland were male.
The figure for second-level teachers was only slightly higher, at 15 per cent and "if the imbalance was the other way round, we would feel the need to address it". She suggested that the requirement for honours Irish was an obstacle to men going into teaching.
Ms Hanafin said she was not sure if there was any connection, but the primary-level female-to-male teacher ratio at 9:1 was worrying, while men represented 29.1 per cent of teachers at secondary level.
"There are positive moves that could be taken, but one must be very careful about equality legislation to ensure that one is not discriminating in favour of one group," she said.
Fine Gael's spokeswoman on education, Olwyn Enright, said that just three out of every 10 Leaving Cert students attempted honours Irish in 2003, and only 30 per cent of that number were young men.
Requiring an honours qualification "lessens the numbers that can go into this field, unlike the situation with English and maths".
Ms Enright said Irish was not being taught in a relevant and applied way, particularly at second level, and it did not reflect the modern needs of the language.
She pointed out that students were "learning off reams of passages for oral examinations without having a real understanding of the spoken language itself".
The Minister said: "There should be more emphasis on oral Irish at second level, in particular approaching the Leaving Cert exam as it is too heavily weighted on literature rather than on the language itself considering we are encouraging people to go to the Gaeltacht".
