摘要：Recent media attention has focused on the low ranking of Ireland in a major internationalstudy on literacy. In this paper we examine the dataset used in these studies to consider the reasonbehind the low ranking. We find significant evidence that the underlying reason for this is the lowlevel of formal schooling of older individuals, possibly due to the lack of free secondary schooling.Moreover we find that formal schooling in Ireland has a bigger effect on literacy outcomes than ineither Northern Ireland or Great Britain
