![]() ![]() I'm not comparing my book to The Mona Lisa but just studying a few chapters of Gafa is a little like asking children to judge Leonardo da Vinci's great painting my showing them the lips only.'' ``It gives the impression that the Irish language itself isn't quite all there or complete. ``It would be unthinkable in the English syllabus to do just merely three chapters from To Kill A Mockingbird or just the one act in Hamlet,'' says O' Laighleis. ![]() As the book was also written very much as a warning against young people taking heroin he feels they won't get the message by reading only the beginning. He maintains it's a poor, half-hearted gesture especially as the opening sequences of the novel aren't nearly as disturbing as later chapters. ![]() Education shouldn't just be used to serve society's material needs.''Īs an example of the piecemeal and fragmented way in which we alter our educational system O' Laighleis cites the fact that only the first three chapters of Gafa are being used in the Leaving Certificate. I'm afraid I also see talk of creating a league table of the best and worst schools according to their exam results as just another example of the wrong emphasis entirely. ``The kind of situation we have at the moment is one where if an American multinational came into the country to make round fluffy balls we'd adapt our educational system to produce lots of young people ideal for manufacturing round fluffy balls. ``We have a history of tinkering with the educational system in this country but there's never any plan to totally overhaul it. ![]() ``Iwould never write a novel for the Leaving Certificate and this farcical educational system we have which is really just here to reinforce the status quo rather than produce exceptional, innovative and radical human beings, and put education first,'' says 46-year-old O' Laighleis. He's also very keen to point out that the book was not written for the Leaving Certificate but for the general reader. He feels equally comfortable in both languages and Gafa has already won a national Oireachtas award in its Irish form. When he was writing Gafa O' Laighleis would one day write a chapter in Irish and the next day write the following chapter in English. O' Laighleis writes in both Irish and English. It was his principal at the time who picked up on O' Laighleis' stories and sent them off to various publishers. O' Laighleis threw out his school text books and started creating his own stories, ones that were full of what the pupils saw around them in their own world. His students would chat to him about the joy riders who were in trouble the day before or the Punk they'd seen on their way to school. Not long after he started teaching his fifth and sixth classes in national school he realised that the content of the subjects the children had to learn totally alienated them. His progress into writing books was entirely accidental but also very significant from the point of view of those who set the Leaving Certificate Irish syllabus. Sallynoggin-born Re O' Laighleis was a primary school teacher in Galway for 12 years before he packed in the day job to concentrate on writing full time. Centred on 17-year-old Alan who has fallen into taking heroin, Gafa explores how a family reacts when it learns Alan's awful secret. However, its introduction into the secondary school curriculum has been roundly welcomed on the grounds that Irish as a school subject has finally got a dose of reality and is in step with a contemporary beat at last, a move it is hoped will capture the imagination of students. No doubt some will object to its explicitness. O' Laighleis' novel is graphic and hard hitting. Therapy, rock music and extra-marital affairs have replaced Peig's clay pipe and sitting around the fire telling stories. Gafa inhabits the world of well-off middle-class Dublin of the 1990s with all its urban angst, moral decay, drug addiction, loneliness, and teen attitudes and problems. Gafa, or Hooked as it's called in the English version, is a huge and dramatic leap from the rural West of Ireland of yesteryear of Peig and her deprived, ascetic peasant habits. Re O Laighleis' Gafa is the new prescribed text and it's all about a young teenager hooked on heroin. After years of dampening and dulling the imagination of many a fervent youth Peig Sayers has been taken off the Leaving Certificate Irish syllabus and been replaced by a novel bang up to speed with modern Ireland. Ireland of the 1990s has finally arrived in the curriculum of Irish in our secondary schools. Peig Sayers has been taken off the Leaving Certificate Irish syllabus and replaced by a novel set in today's Ireland about a young teenager hooked on heroin. ![]()
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