Sir, - If there were to be a prize for the most ridiculous reason of the millennium, I would like to nominate Telecom Eireann for its grounds, as stated in your edition of September 20th, for the corporate name change to Eircom, viz: "Some Americans assumed Telecom Eireann was an Iranian phone company."
I would have formed the opinion that any person, American or otherwise, who was stupid enough to confuse the two countries in the first place would have had tremendous difficulty in dialling a telephone number anyway. The secondary reason for discarding the former identity, that "many Europeans had difficulty in pronouncing `Eireann' ", nevertheless seems to be perpetuated in the word Eircom, which has the same root.
The sum total of this piece of nonsense is that Telecom has now squandered £6.5 million in abandoning an easily recognisable, pan-European name (c.f. Deutsche Telekom, Telecom France, Telecom Italia, British Telecom, even, dare I say it, Esat Telecom) and has produced, instead, a corporate identity that would not be out of place in a company which manufactures air compressors. May I venture to suggest that, next time TE/Eircom has six-and-a-half million to spare, it uses it in a way which would result in a substantial reduction in my phone bill? - Yours, etc.,
D.K. Henderson, Castle Avenue, Clontarf, Dublin 3.