Sir, – The recent exchange of letters between Bruce Arnold (February 25th) and several lawyers (February 24th) has surely proved the need for a referendum to repeal the ridiculous Article 25.4 of the Constitution which gives the Irish-language text primacy over the English text. What possible purpose does this clause serve in a country where most citizens can use only a couple of phrases of the language?
It is widely acknowledged that the Irish text was simply a translation of the English, which makes it laughable that the Irish version is to be relied on when an ambiguity arises. The late Prof John Kelly observed that the work of the “nameless translators” of the 1937 text went “virtually without debate in a Dáil whose members knew very little Irish anyway” and noted that they used “the Irish future tense rather than the Irish present, where English grammar would make no distinction”, with the enormous significance of this having gone entirely unnoticed.
This clause, along with Article 8 which makes Irish the first language of the State, were the first examples of the fetishisation of the Irish language which was to become one of the many sacred cows and walls of political cant that have existed virtually unchallenged since the foundation of the State.
This particular piece of tokenism, however, has had substantial repercussions because of the impact that the Irish text has had on the interpretation of the Constitution in the intervening decades. While Mr Arnold wildly overestimates the potential effect which the Irish translation could have on the current referendum, he has nonetheless done us a service by illustrating what a nonsense it is that the Irish-language version is given primacy in the first place. – Yours, etc,
BARRY WALSH,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.