Third Level Education
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-12
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James Lawless (FF), Kildare North

I know Conradh na Gaeilge well. I will be meeting its representatives in the near future to discuss their submissions and requests. I am very supportive and I hope we can do as much as we can for them. I mentioned some of the actions we are taking. There are a couple of specific actions we are taking to meet the target. We are working with the Department of Education and Youth to examine the transition of students from Irish-language post-primary education because we know there is a huge growth in the bunscoileanna and Gaelscoileanna. The question is how they move on to tertiary education, because we do not want their Irish to fall away when they move to third level education. We are working with the Department of Social Protection on the sectoral working group I mentioned already to see how that can contribute to the targets. We are undertaking research to understand the demand and availability of both the courses and of students wishing to take them up. We are also examining the inclusion of Irish-medium courses in future expressions of interest. We are running a number of expressions of interest with the HEA at the moment for new course provision in areas like disability, therapies, medicine, veterinary, etc. We will see if we can include Irish as one of those in the future and if there is an option to provide those courses, we will.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-12/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-12