Madam, - The issue arising in regard to the status of Irish in the European Union is whether Irish should be a working language of the Union or not. It has official status. That is why treaty texts and important texts contributing to the formulation of new treaties are made available in Irish.
I ask your readers to try to imagine for a moment what it would be like if Irish were now to be given working status. To begin with, every document, whether of the Council or the Commission - that is, many thousands of pages per year - would have to be translated into Irish. At key points of the legislative process, no text is deemed to have been formally transmitted (e.g. from the Commission to the Council) unless and until it is available in all the languages.
At Council meetings a team of interpreters would have to be present to render simultaneously into Irish the contributions of Ministers not expressing themselves in that language. That Ministers from our own country might not express themselves in that eloquent idiom is, to say the least, a situation which might occur from time to time.
In that situation, what could justify the huge expense of finding and training interpreters to put Irish on, for instance, what the Finn or the Greek is saying? And vice versa? The late Monsignor Pádraig de Brún himself would have been hard put to it to oblige. Even if the author of your Editorial of January 13th, who indeed refers to the desirability of providing work for Irish-speaking graduates, considers such a question inappropriate, I can imagine that it is one which would certainly occur to those who have to contribute most to the EU budget and who are most concerned, as we are all, to avoid inflation.
To cite the case of Malta is hardly to strengthen your argument. In Brussels the demand to have Maltese made a working language is regarded as the height of absurdity. For one thing, there is uncertainty as to which dialect of Maltese, out of the three or four to hand, is to be regarded as a working language of the Union.
In contrast, the Brussels view is that Ireland has got it about right in ensuring that our first official language has official status, but refraining from having it made a working language, given that the bulk of our public representatives are prepared to use as a vehicular language one which is already an EU working language. (Compare in this respect the similar attitude of Luxembourg.)
Your Editorial fails to adduce evidence that Irish public representatives have changed their attitude or, in general, have acquired the necessary linguistic prowess to enable them to act otherwise. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID M. NELIGAN, Silchester Road, Glenageary, Co Dublin.