Madam, - Once upon a time, RTÉ employed a being called head of presentation. One of his or her functions was to monitor the speech standards of the station's presenters and newsreaders and let them know when they didn't get it right. Words should be delivered "as if presented on a silver salver" was one of the dictums emanating from the presentation office.
It's far from silver salvers the current lot were reared. RTÉ's speech output is riddled with the soft Irish "t", a fairly new phenomenon which is driving one of our national treasures to distraction (Gay Byrne, The Irish Times Magazine, December 18th). Mr Byrne has rightly sounded off about this before and he is becoming increasingly worked up about this bizarre verbal aberration which has crept into the speech patterns of even the usually immaculate Brian Dobson.
In addition, the younger crowd are allowed to get away with pronouncing "news" as "nooze", "Or"-TE when they mean "Ar"-TE, and "Portlaoise" without the final syllable. And they have a myriad of incomprehensible DART-style pronunciations of perfectly ordinary, everyday words.
Then there is the sloppy use of language; "republican" instead of "nationalist" is currently top of the list.
The national broadcaster should play a leading role in setting and maintaining proper speech standards. Does anyone in there care anymore? -Yours, etc.,
LOUIS HOGAN,
Corbawn Grove,
Shankill,
Dublin 18