Madam, - It is quite unbelievable that an erstwhile teacher, and an aspiring leader of the tribe, should propose abolishing compulsory Irish for Leaving Certificate pupils. This sadly retrograde step sends the wrong message altogether to Ireland's youth, while showing up the failure of successive governments to restore our native language.
At this juncture in the fate of Irish, the enlightened approach - which should have been taken in the early, heady days of the fledgling State - would be to change the curriculum by introducing Irish as a spoken language. This direct method, the "modh díreach", is something that has been urged for years by those who hold their country and their language dear, knowing that the life of any language is not just to learn it, but to speak it.
Without a language of our own, the badge of our identity, we are nothing but another England, and unfortunately, thanks to faulty teaching methods, our school-leavers today go out into an English-speaking Ireland, where whatever Irish they have learned has no place, no importance and, worse, no status.
Example is more powerful than precept. Why not conduct the business of the Dáil through Irish? Surely our elected representatives are fluent in the medium. Ditto for the civil service. And why not restore our placenames to their original, mellifluous, meaningful Irish, that the English, not being able to pronounce, Anglicised so mercilessly and so meaninglessly?
Even at this eleventh hour, Mr Kenny should be giving the young people of Ireland, our future citizens and leaders, a positive message of pride in their country, and their language, not the opposite. - Yours, etc,
VERA HUGHES, Moate, Co Westmeath.
Madam, - Irish is a very difficult language to learn, as a variety of Leaving Cert students complained on RTÉ's Five Seven Live last Friday. If a capable student can speak French after six years, but can't speak Irish after fourteen, clearly something is wrong.
Much of the focus is on improving the curriculum, but why not change the language? Eliminate many of the arbitrary and inconsistent rules and simplify the spelling, and Irish might become far more popular with students.
There are plenty of successful precedents: languages including French, German, and Russian have undergone centralised reform of their spelling, grammar or both. The most relevant analogy is that of modern Hebrew, which is primarily the creation of one man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who based it on the biblical language but adapted words and features from other languages, and simplified and regularised the grammar. The result of his work is that modern Hebrew is the official tongue of Israel and widely spoken by Jews around the world.
With most people encountering Irish in the classroom rather than through everyday conversation, changes should be easy to implement and quick to take root. Existing prose and poetry could be transcribed into the reformed language. As with Hebrew, all that is required is will. - Yours, etc,
LUKE MURPHY, Toronto, Canada.
Madam, - You will hear more Welsh in five minutes in Holyhead and many other towns in Wales than you will Irish in most of the so-called Gaeltachts in a week. Irish is barely a community language any more; it is a language spoken occasionally by a small scattered minority, in most cases very much as a second tongue.
In reality there are two prongs to what passes for Irish language policy. One is to force the language on school children, whose parents would drop it given half a chance, albeit regretfully. Hence the need for compulsion, which is hardly the way to encourage interest in the language after the pupils leave school.
The other is a puerile effort to convince ourselves and others that we actually speak Irish, or rather would if it could be done without any effort on our part. So we have all the nonsense of bilingual signs and documents, the calling of major institutions by their Irish names (institutions where the language used is invariably English) and of course the emphasis on status. So the Constitution, in the teeth of reality, accords Irish a superior status to English.
We then use this status to enhance the status of Irish in the EU. One absurdity piled on another.
This charade wouldn't fool a moderately intelligent schoolchild, yet we have gone along with it for 80 long years of self-deception. Enda Kenny's proposal is a tiny shift, in a history of tiny shifts, towards reality. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID HERMAN, Meadow Grove, Dublin 16.