Madam, - For every letter a gaelgeoir sends castigating Enda Kenny, there are many other students from the same year's schooling who resented being forced to study a subject for which they had either no inclination or no talent. These people support his opinion, but you won't get many letters from them because, being in the majority, they haven't formed interest groups. He may get their votes though.
I am one of many who are stunned that they can have received an honour in Irish but still feel even less fluent in it than in French, for example, another language in which I got an honour but haven't used regularly since leaving school. Why does panic swell in my breast, why does my throat go dry when I am addressed in Irish? I think much of the attitude to our national language, and our inability to speak it, has to do with the way Irish was reintroduced after Independence, with similar heavy-handedness to the way it had nearly been wiped out: through bullying and enforcement, a hypersensitivity to rules and regulations and a sense that you should be ashamed if you can't speak it, not proud if you can.
Making Irish a choice for the Leaving Cert might lead to an initial fall in class sizes, but it would mean that those who did study Irish were genuinely involved and this interest and enthusiasm would help remove the reputation of Irish as a horrible, undesirable subject. Teachers would no longer be enforcers and would be able to engage with their motivated students to truly create a living language of communication. Numbers would recover because most Irish people, even those like me whose Irish turns to ash on their tongues when they try to speak it, do value their language, would love to be able to speak it and are as upset as they are puzzled at why, after years of study, they can't. Let the language breathe. - Is mise,
TERESA MURRAY,
The Locks,
Ringsend Road,
Dublin 4.
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Madam, - Vera Hughes (November 22nd) makes a strong argument, better than I could, for an issue I have debated with teachers for years: that Irish should be taught only as a spoken language until the end of National School.
Grammar and poetry are fine when a language is thriving as a spoken entity, but attempting to teach them in current circumstances is, at best, stupid.
What Irish needs for survival and acceptance is to be taught exclusively as a spoken language for at least the first five years and then developed into the eloquence that only Irish can deliver. - Yours, etc,
JACK FEEHAN,
Moorpark Street,
Birr,
Co Offaly.