Daily Nuacht on the 8th of September 2026

News headline that caught my eye today are… Irish teenagers are still reading books but PISA schools collapse across Europe, Prince George heads to Eton while Prince Harry remains uninvited and Ireland strengthens citizenship rules. 1.Irish teenagers are still reading. Ireland's 15-year-olds have ranked first for reading, third for science and fourth for mathematics out of the 27 EU countries, in a major international educational study. The results for England were also excellent, Wales and Scotland were much weaker. This pleases me as my two eldest were educated at primary school in England. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures how well a cohort of 15-year-old students are doing in the three core domains of reading, mathematics and science. The study is conducted every four years, with the next cycle due in 2029. Students in Ireland also rated above the EU and OECD averages in computational problem solving. However, overall the report revealed that Irish students' performance in reading and mathematics is lower than in previous cycles of the study. But this is not surprising as school test scores continue to collapse internationally. Keeping teenagers reading will become more and more challenging over time. Some believe we are entering a new oral tradition and a new dark age because so few educated people read. Given the first Dark Age was not in fact a dark age, then perhaps the true Dark Age is upon us.