Teen Times/Naomi Elster: Another day, another 40 minutes of Irish. Another 40 minutes spent wondering who exactly the Government and the EU are trying to kid.
Ireland is not bilingual, and if it ever will be, the second language will be Chinese or Polish, not Gaeilge. Those who say that Irish is a part of our culture may have a valid point; but the IRA was a part of our culture for a long time and I don't hear anyone shouting about the need to keep the organisation alive.
In fact, I don't think that Irish is alive any more. If you saw a corpse, dead for more than 100 years, on the roadside, would you immediately commence mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or would you bid farewell and bury it? Nothing irritates me more than all of these great Government initiatives to keep Irish alive.
We're not fooled.
Hector can hang where he likes and spend a small fortune on sunglasses, and the Seoige sisters can show as much leg as they wish, but nothing makes an modh coinníollach sexy.
Today's teenagers have enough to worry about - we do more subjects in our final exams than most other countries in Europe. So foisting the responsibility for upholding a decayed language on us simply isn't fair.
What has the Irish language done for the Irish people since we got our freedom, all those years ago? We owe the Celtic Tiger to the English language.
The multinational businesses that brought wealth to our formerly poor country came because they had a cheap (how times change!), well-educated, and, above all else, English-speaking workforce at their disposal. The recent trade talks with India didn't take place as Gaeilge.
Within Europe and without, Ireland has become a major player, and the fact that we can fluently speak English, the third most common language in the world, is a major advantage in the worlds of politics, sport, education, and anything else you care to think of. If we spoke Irish, we would still be on the periphery of civilisation, just seen as a few tribes running around on a rock somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.
Instead, we are seen internationally as a dynamic, sovereign state. The days of being an add-on to England are over; we have our own identity now at long last.
Perhaps it's ironic that we owe our independence from Britain to the language they forced upon us, but we do, and the sooner we accept it, the better.
Irish is a beautiful language and always will be, but it's difficult to feel proud of it when you have two poems and a story that you can't understand, a translation you can't do, and a mountain of utterly horrendous gramadach to do for the morning.
I am not suggesting that we scrap Irish completely - just that we stop pretending. As a language, it's dead. Let's face up to the reality.
Lifting the burden of an extra exam subject from the already over-stressed Leaving Cert students would not deprive anyone of an identity. Citizenship and national pride is about so much more than a dead language. It is long past time we made the Irish an optional subject.
Naomi Elster (16) is a student at Brigidine Secondary School, Mountrath, Co Laois
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