Despite the very real need for foreign language speakers in Ireland's financial services industry, Irish students aren't keen on becoming linguists

As we pointed out a few weeks ago, Ireland's financial services employers are very keen to hire linguists. PayPal, for example, is being forced to offer half the jobs it's creating in Ireland to non-Irish nationals, and says there's a particular shortage of German, Dutch and Nordic language speakers.

Despite this, Ireland's youth don't seem overly keen on studying languages - and when they do, they're not overly good at them.

Results out today show that the number of Irish higher level students studying French declined this year to 13,720. Only 4,300 took German and only 2,500 took Spanish. Only 717 studied Polish and only 251 studied Russian.

Only 14% of Irish students who studied French got an A. However, 75% of the Russian students achieved an A (suggesting some of them may have been native Russian speakers going for an easy option.)

Whether anyone fulfilled PayPal's wishes and studied Swedish or Norwegian is not immediately clear. It seems unlikely, however.