Sir, - The standards of Irish of prospective National School teachers may well be deplorable, as Donall O Morain suggests. But could this result from the unnatural situation of having to learn a language which the great majority will never need to use to communicate with another human being?
When I first lived in Germany I was able to do my work in English. But going to lunch with my colleagues was frustrating contrary to our prejudices about Germans there seemed to be something very like "craic" going on and I couldn't understand a word of it. Then I got to know someone whose English was no better than my German. To communicate at all, we would both have to say things that we knew might well be nonsense. But it worked! Little more than a year later the interview for my present job was conducted entirely in German. A dozen sessions in a language school helped to straighten out my grammar, but at the decisive moment there was no dictionary or grammar book in sight: just two people who open their mouths in the hope that the other one understands what comes out. Dare I say that this is the only proper motivation for learning a language?
Forcing children to "learn" a language, which they cannot imagine using to communicate in this, way, is a piece of perverse cruelty. Why was it possible for me to go through the Irish school system without an inkling of the enjoyment to be had out of learning a new language, and seriously underestimating my aptitude to do so? Maybe because we have had generations of teachers who never really wanted to learn Irish trying to teach it to pupils who certainly didn't, some of whom subsequently became teachers themselves.
I have nothing against native Irish speakers, or people who learn Irish voluntarily as adults. On the contrary, I admire them. But they would not be fewer if children and student teachers had the same choice. It's time we, stopped misusing this language to shore up an independence as fictitious as our beef industry. Yours, etc.,
Karl-Schoenherrgasse,
Graz
Austria