Madam, – While Richard Pine’s description (Irishman’s Diary, Diary, April 11th) of Micheál Mac Liammóir as “an Englishman pretending to be an Irishman pretending to be an Englishman”, is not untrue, it is somewhat reductionist.
In learning to speak and write Irish as well as he did, he refused to recognise the great rift so beloved of some of our writers who use even less Irish than politicians, and put the Irish language which they declare dead on one side and English on the other. It is no harm that outsiders such as Mac Liammóir, or Pearse whose father was English, have sometimes shown us up in this way. – Yours, etc,