Yes, you would have been required to study Irish in school. Exemptions are granted to students who demonstrate that they have some form of learning difficulty which affects their language acquisition, as well as to students who may have begun their education in a different country, making it too difficult for them to sufficiently improve their knowledge of Irish before taking state examinations.

As djwebb said, your education in Irish would likely be to a different standard depending on where you attended school, in a Gaeltacht area or outside, though it would also depend on other factors like the teacher, where they were from and their own fluency in Irish.

Schools around the country tend to teach the caighdeán Irish, but state level examinations include a listening comprehension test which requires students to listen to conversations by speakers of all three major dialects for a small portion of their grades. Pronunciation in schools is often heavily influenced by English phonetics and, as I said above, the proficiency of the teacher. As for orthography, it's entirely post-spelling reform word forms which are taught and tested. Both native and non native speakers take the same state exams. I suspect the intention is to ensure a common level of proficiency both with the caighdeán, and with comprehending other dialects, even if the execution may leave something to be desired.

It may also be worth noting that the Irish curriculum, like the English one, until recently at least, has focused heavily on the study of literature at the expense of spoken language. Proficiency in Irish is examined also, of course, but what students are taught in the classroom for the most part is more literary than linguistic, and involves reading and discussing poetry and prose. In this sense it may be more justifiable to have native and non native speakers in the one class, however, there have been calls for decades to separate the syllabus into two discrete courses; a language learning course, and a literature course.

In theory, none of this should result in a student being penalised if they use non-standard spellings or dialectal Irish so long as the Irish they use is correct for that dialect. In practice, however, this is difficult to ensure as it requires employing examiners with knowledge of specific dialects to carry out exam correction work, and ensuring these examiners get exam papers from students using a particular dialect, while also ensuring that the examiners are not acquainted with the students' whose papers they are correcting and capable of working out who they are when looking at their work. This may sound unlikely, but in some small communities of speakers I suspect it's a non-trivial issue. I've heard anecdotes from native speakers who went to school in Gaeltacht areas who claim that they achieved poorer grades than they believed they deserved because they used dialectal forms and béarlachas terms which are familiar to them instead of the prescribed dictionary terminology. I'm inclined to believe them.

Nevertheless, I've got to disagree with djwebb's assertion:



It's an unfortunate possibility, if an examiner is not proficient in the dialect, but at least in theory it should not be considered incorrect. There is an appeals process for state examinations, and I suspect if native speaker communities were more proactive about demanding reassessment where necessary, it would do a lot of good for the teaching and examination of Irish all around the country.

GRMA. Tuigím-se cad ar a thaobh a mbeadh fadhbanna maidir le Béarlachas (is gráin liom é sin). Má's i gceart a thuigím, amhthach, they would mark my pre-1950 spelling wrong but not the "thá" etc which is still used. I assume there wouldn't be a problem with the seana-chlódh either if so unless they claimed not to be able to read it.

Bhraithfeadh sin ar fad ar an scrúdaitheoir. "Thá" is still widely used, but if the examiner is unfamiliar with it they may nevertheless mark it as wrong. As for pre-standard spellings, I suspect you'd actually have a better chance of them being marked as correct than something like "thá". I imagine that examiners would be more likely to give students the benefit of the doubt where vocabulary is concerned, at least, where a word looks like it could be an older spelling, than in cases of verbal morphology. For example, a form like "thá" could conceivably be conflated with a grammatical mistake because of the apparent lenition if an examiner were unfamiliar with its usage.

I actually expect there would be a big problem with using the seanchló, because the majority of those literate in Irish today are literate in the modern standard. Most never learn to read or use the seanchló. That being the case, I suspect most examiners would have a lot of trouble interpreting it. Granted, this is conjecture on my part, but I strongly suspect that since it stopped being taught in the schools several decades ago now, students never even attempt to use it anymore.

Again, of course, in theory none of this should cause you to be penalised by an examiner. But in a hypothetical scenario where you did use dialectal forms, older spellings and the seanchló, I suspect it would cause some problems.

'Sé an rud nách maith liom ná ceann-leitreacha R agus S d'úsáid in inead na R-anna agus S-anna ársa.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wlup5z66t8tqxsiyz8px9/R-and-S.jpg?rlkey=9he45eocxh4knw9e69rj0n031&dl=0

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