Teacher with MS urges Laois schools to join Readathon
Teacher Keith Byrne was diagnosed with MS in 2015. File image
A PRIMARY school teacher with multiple sclerosis (MS) is urging Laois schools to sign up for the MS Readathon Reading Challenge in November.
Diagnosed with MS in 2015, Keith Byrne has spent over a decade rebuilding his own relationship with focus, patience and words. As a teacher, he has seen up close how a child's relationship with reading gets built or lost during the first few years of school.
Keith is MS Ireland's ambassador for the 2026 MS Readathon, now in its 39th year. Rather than assigning a single ‘worthy’ book, the challenge simply asks children to read anything from a comic to an audiobook regularly, for a sponsored period, with no test at the end beyond finishing the story.
For Keith, the stakes go beyond literacy scores. Living with MS means navigating fatigue and occasional brain fog and he's spoken candidly about how writing and reading became one of the ways he processed his own diagnosis.
He sees the same connective power at work with his students: a shared book becomes a shared language, in the classroom and, eventually, at home. His own eldest son has done the MS Readathon for several years running.
Keith isn't the only one who can trace a lifelong reading habit back to a childhood Readathon. Speaking on Ryan Tubridy's podcast last year, Tánaiste Simon Harris recalled taking part in the MS Readathon himself as a child, describing how he ‘gorged on books’ while getting sponsored for the challenge, long before either books or public life shaped his career.
Now a teacher at Virgin Mary Boys’ NS in Ballymun, Dublin, Keith has seen how a book doesn't need to be long or dense to leave a mark and how the wrong kind of book, one that looks too big or too text-heavy, can put a reluctant reader off before they've even started.
“These are the kids' formative years. These books look like normal novels but there's only a small amount of writing on each page, so they're able to get through it and they're led by the pictures too," Keith says of titles such as ‘Dog Man’ and ‘Captain Underpants’, both hugely popular with his own students and his eldest son.
On paper, Irish 15-year-olds can feel reassured. The OECD's latest PISA report was the largest of its kind, covering 91 countries and economies and ranks Ireland first in the EU for reading, third for science and fourth for maths.
But inside that good news is a warning the report itself doesn't shy away from: globally, reading scores have fallen by 28 points since 2015, the steepest decline of any of the three core skills measured, and the share of ‘hasty readers’, students who rush through a text and guess rather than think, has nearly doubled since 2018.
The report notes: ‘Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources and thinking critically about what we read.’
In a world flooded with information, the OECD warns, students are losing the habit of slowing down.
The MS Readathon philosophy maps neatly onto what the OECD data suggests Irish schools most need to protect: not necessarily more reading instruction but more reading for pleasure in short, achievable, low-pressure bursts.
MS Ireland chief executive Ava Battles observes: “The MS Readathon does two things at once. It encourages a lifelong love of reading in children, while also helping fund vital services for the more than 11,000 people living with MS in Ireland.”
With Irish reading scores currently a rare bright spot in a bleak OECD picture, Keith's message to schools and families is simple: don't take it for granted. The MS Readathon, he argues, is exactly the kind of low-cost, high-impact intervention that keeps that advantage alive for the next generation, one sponsored page at a time.
First launched in 1988, the MS Readathon takes place throughout November 2026. Schools, families and individual readers can register free at msreadathon.ie, choosing any reading material they like, including novels, comics and audiobooks, and getting sponsored to read.
