We mightn’t like to think we’ve anything to thank Britain for but we have and it’s the English language.

This was brought home to me over the past few days at Green Week in Berlin.

I was in a group with people from all over the world and English was a native language for just four of us: an American, a South African, a Kenyan and myself.

The remainder came from countries as far apart as Uruguay, Mexico, Kosovo, Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lithuania, China, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Cyprus.

It was like the Eurovision without the voting.

Almost all had perfect English. Those who hadn’t were still well able to understand everything that was going on and make their contribution.

Not alone had they English, but many spoke excellent German into the bargain. When it came to casual conversation, those from the Balkan countries all had Russian to fall back on.

There was I with my smattering of German feeling pretty under-educated.

Whatever about my time in school, it beats me how so many children today still leave secondary school with just the bare basics of Irish, or for that matter any of the foreign languages on the school curriculum.

How can you spend 14 years learning Irish or six learning French or German and be unable to take part in a casual conversation?

The orals are the scariest part of the State exams. From what I could see from my three children, it was all about learning great chunks of conversation off by heart in the hope that some of it would come up. Fluency didn’t come easily.

There’s no doubt that immersion in a foreign language helps with fluency. However, it’s very difficult to become fluent when you might have only three or four 40-minute classes a week.

Is it time we took notice of the eastern Europeans and Asians who send their young people here in their thousands to learn English?

Bernie Carroll, former chair of Ballyhoura Development, saw an opportunity to provide such a service with Student Programmes Ireland Ltd.

She brings teenagers to Ireland who stay with families and attend the local secondary school for anything from one term to a full school year.

The youngsters are placed with families who have a teenager roughly the same age and they take part in everything that’s going on in the community.

Given our need to continually grow markets, should we not aim to have a similar programme in place for, say, 20% of those doing transition year? It would be money well spent and make for a really worthwhile transition year.

As an exporting country, we need to rethink how we teach languages. It’s not good enough to say, sure everyone speaks English and we will be grand.

Being able to speak the language of our customers is a real mark of respect to them.

Finally, the American in the group was inclined to jeer at my Irish brogue. Somehow or other he thought my pronunciation of “butter” hilarious.

After politely putting up with it for a while, I reminded him that we Irish had a wonderful track record in terms of Nobel laureates.

Thanks to the brilliance of Yeats, Beckett, Shaw and Heaney, I was able to put that American in his place.

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