Sir, - On December 10th your paper gave considerable prominence, in both English and Irish, to two items by Pol O Muiri which offered what I would regard as a fairly radical misrepresentation of the basic content of an article by the President of Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) in the weekly paper La.
Mr O Muiri treated with a pofaced solemnity what was very obviously a tissue of satire, beginning his report in English on the article with the words "The President of the Gaelic League, Mr Gearoid O Caireallain, has said that the promotion of Irish among Protestants in Northern Ireland is a `disease'."
For your information and that of your readers, I translate enough of Mr O Caireallain's article to give the point he was patently driving at: "There is only one way to make Irish attractive to the Protestants of Northern Ireland. And this is the same way as that for making Irish attractive to Northern Ireland Catholics, to Irish Catholics, to Irish Protestants ... have business and arts in Irish ... and a lot of fun. The great irony is that enterprises that would rightly make Irish attractive are what are most difficult to get financial support for from the funding authorities."
I take into account, necessarily, the satiric mode in which O Caireallain's article was cast; but, as one Irish Protestant - a southern one, very much a Protestant - I deny absolutely that that article was anti-Protestant in tenor, and I am not a member of Conradh na Gaeilge nor more than a casual acquaintance of Mr O Caireallain, and certainly I do not feel I have to concur with all he says or writes. However, he has, I submit, been done an injustice in this case regarding an issue on which I would be quite sensitive if there were anything to be sensitive about - bigotry. - Yours, etc.,
Teach Grove, Baile an Mhuilinn, Baile Atha Cliath 6.