In view of the challenges posed to our society by Brexit and the executive actions of President Trump in his first couple of days as US President and in respect of the programme for Government, will the Minister for Education and Skills agree to restore history to a full place in the curriculum of Irish schools so that today's students are not besieged by alt-right and alt-left material and alternative facts but that we go back to history and looking at what its lessons may teach us? Could we see the development of language learning at primary level?

The Deputy can only raise one point.

I will ask the Minister for Education and Skills to respond.

We had a very useful debate in the Seanad on the role of history and I think there was unanimity around the motion passed. The position is that we are developing much better curricula in history and it is part of the junior cycle reforms. At present, compulsory history only applies in voluntary secondary schools - 52% of schools - but 90% of pupils take it up. One of the problems is that they fall away very rapidly thereafter so the junior cycle curriculum has not been a satisfactory curriculum and is being reformed. It is not very different from when I was in school and is based on trying to retain huge volumes of dates and events, which is not the true type of history instruction we need. We should be equipping our young people to have the critical skills to which Deputy Burton referred. We had a very good debate and are reforming the curriculum and it will be very good for history in Ireland.