Yup. English teaching in Italy is nearly that bad. (Slightly less bad per-hour, but the smaller total number of hours a student in Italy studies English than a student in Ireland studies Irish compensates that, so the English of the median Italian right after high school is about as bad as the Irish of the median Irish person right after high school.)

People in the rest of mainland Europe (excl. France and Spain) are much better at English, but I don't know how much of that is due to schools and how much to the fact that they watch English films with subtitles there whereas we dub the crap out of¹ everything here in Italy.

1. Or should I say “into”, given the quality of translations. ;-)