Sir, - With reference to the new Leaving Cert English Literature syllabus to be introduced in September 1999, I note the deletion of the three greatest writers in English of the 20th century in genres of poetry, drama and the novel, namely Yeats, Beckett and Joyce, who also happen to be Irish.
Thus, for example, Joyce's Bildungsroman masterpiece, Portrait of the Artist, has been dropped, whereas Penelope Lively's City of the Mind, a "dumbed down" Ulysses representing a Thatcherite London mind-set of the 1980s, has beenincluded.
Is this an obscurantist betrayal of the educational imperative to initiate the young into the cultural heritage - or just plain Hibernophobia? - Yours, etc.,
John Cotter,
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Russell Court,
Ballykeeffe,
Limerick.