Irish orthography: what do teachers and learners need to know about it, and why?

Irish has significant State support, but lacks a research base to support the teaching of Irish reading. Current approaches to teaching Irish reading are presented, and outcomes summarised. Issues of consistency and complexity in Irish orthography are discussed in light of an analysis of a corpus of early reader texts, and the formulation of rules for discriminating between words which are regular by letter-sound and grapheme-sound rules is outlined. While the most frequent words show a high level of regularity, underlying rules are very complex. The need to target decoding skills early is discussed. Recommendations regarding the teaching of aspects of Irish orthography are presented.