A chara, - Eddie Holt, albeit not an unambiguously hostile observer, served us another salvo of bealbochtery about the failure of Irish language revival (June 16th). We were again told that "attempts to make Irish more attractive to young urban people have generally been clumsy and sometimes downright embarrassing". He goes on to complain about bad modern terminology, Peig and (axiomatically) bad instruction in Irish, as well as the incompatibility of the language with popular culture.
All us who are involved in making Irish fit for the 21st century by, say, promoting it on the internet, probably find Mr Holt's article deeply irritating, because it relies exclusively on popular, even naive, perceptions of the situation of Irish today. Mr Holt does admit that "perhaps the current curriculum has lessened such remembered gaps of 30 years ago" (such as the supposed "incompatibility" of Irish with youth culture), but he never seems to admit that in order to give his readers a fair and square assessment of the situation today, he should simply find out about what is happening in Irish today, instead of relying on his own antediluvian remembrances.
In fact, the difficulties in reviving Irish are to no small extent due to the fact that serious newspapers and media still perceive this sort of remembrances as tantamount to up-to-date news coverage as far as Irish language is concerned. Instead of giving publicity to what is actually happening now in Irish - to the increase of Irish in the world-wide web, for instance - even a moderately pro-Irish language newspaper as Irish Times simply confines itself to reproducing official resolutions about "griosofar, mas feidir", Conradh na Gaeilge's "dea-ghealladh drochchomhlionadh", and high school reminiscences of people like Eddie Holt, whose views on the question are well-known and widely spread, but not especially well-informed for that. They were old cliches already when he started learning Irish at school. Reprinting these cliches now will only help to reproduce them and keep them alive.
Does Mr Holt have anything new to say about Irish? What does he say? The same old story: wouldn't it be grand if Irish could be revived, but it can't, because it isn't fit for modern life. The same old convenient excuses for lazy kids not to learn the language. Irish is not fit for modern life, because Irish isn't fit for modern life. Case closed.
I always thought journalism was about trying to look at things out of a new angle, trying to find out what is the news about it, and telling the news to the world. But as far as the Irish language is regarded, "news" means recycled reminiscences from the 1950s. If I were prone to conspiracy theories, I would wonder if this is part of a conscious campaign to keep the non-Irish reading public ignorant of new developments in the Irish language scene; but it is rather part of a syndrome of a more passive, apathetical nature: an unconscious prejudice that Irish does not matter and that it is not worth the fuss to go beyond repeating old cliches.
The fact that Mr Holt's article was printed at all, instead of, say, publishing an up-to-date report about Irish on the Internet, is in fact part of the reason why Irish isn't thriving. - Is mise, le meas,
Panu Petteri, Turku, Finland.