There is a story in this morning’s Irish Independent that An Spailpín Fánach just can’t get his head around.
A scholar in Cork is being denied entry to UCC because the NUI demands Irish, and this young lady’s exemption was not on the records. And this is terrible because of the Herculean effort she made on the final day of the exam, sitting three three-hour exams, in Religious Education, Italian and Japanese.
Let’s wind back a second. Once the CAO sort out the problem, she’s in. It’s a non-story. But what is interesting are the remarkable circumstances of her Irish exemption.
This scholar can’t study Irish. She has an exemption from studying Irish because she’s dyslexic and from the North originally. But she can manage to study Italian and Japanese.
They don’t speak Italian or Japanese very much among the dreary steeples of the Occupied Territories. And if dyslexia makes Irish difficult, can you image what it does to Japanese, which isn’t rendered in Roman letters but in its own kana script? So how come she can’t – as distinct from won’t - study Irish but can study Italian and Japanese? I don’t get it.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. And shame on the Indo for printing this rubbish in the first place.
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