Irish teacher, called for compulsory Irish to end at the Junior Certificate level, and for the language to be an optional subject for Leaving Certificate students. This provoked considerable comment, and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern argued that it should remain compulsory. Today, estimates of fully native speakers range from 40,000 to 80,000 people. In the republic, there are just over 72,000 people who use Irish as a daily language outside education, as well as a larger minority of the population who are fluent but do not use it on a daily basis. (While census figures indicate that 1.66 million people in the republic have some knowledge of the language, a significant percentage of these know only a little.) Smaller numbers of Irish speakers exist in Britain, Canada (particularly in Newfoundland), the United States of America and other countries. The most significant development in recent decades has been a rise in the number of urban Irish speakers. This community, which has been described as well-educated and mostly upper-class, is largely based on an independent school system (called gaelscoileanna at primary level) which teaches entirely through Irish. These schools perform exceptionally well academically. An analysis of "feeder" schools (which supply students to tertiary level institutions) has shown that 22% of the Irish-medium schools sent all their students on to tertiary level, compared to 7% of English-medium schools. Given the rapid decline in the number of traditional speakers in the Gaeltacht it seems likely that the future of the language is in urban areas. It has been suggested that fluency in Irish, with its social and occupational advantages, may now be the mark of an urban elite. Others have argued, on the contrary, that the advantage lies with a middle-class elite which is simply more likely to speak Irish. It has been estimated that the active Irish-language scene (mostly urban) may comprise as much as 10 per cent of Ireland's population. Northern Ireland and the language Since the partition of Ireland, the language communities in the Republic and Northern Ireland have taken radically different trajectories. While Irish is officially the first language of the Republic, in Northern Ireland the language has little legal status at all. Irish in Northern Ireland has declined rapidly, with its traditional Irish speaking-communities being replaced by learners and Gaelscoileanna. A recent development has been the interest shown by some Protestants in East Belfast who found out Irish was not