Sir, - In his "Belly of the Beast" feature (The Irish Times, January 26th) Michael McLoughlin, back here after an absence of nearly 20 years, and looking at Ireland from the inside, claims that he detects a moral vacuum at the centre of modern Irish society. "In the new Ireland," he claims, "money is the morality, the spirituality, the Mecca". Whatever about the moral vacuum, evidence abounds to enable one to stoutly support the latter claim.
He refers also to what he sees as the discarding of traditional communal values, instancing that even Irish accents are being "gentrified". Schoolgirls on the DART seemed to him to be speaking a foreign language, "in which Home Counties vowels struggle to reach an accommodation with turns of phrase from Australian soaps". Then he adds that the really worrying thing for him "was that people seemed to speak like this on RTE too".
I heartily endorse his impressions as regards the torturing which vowel sounds are getting on the airwaves. One has but to listen to the way, for instance, the frequently used words such as "amount," "account," "thousand," and so on, are now almost generally pronounced on RTE.
The subconscious reaction, if not the conscious one, of viewers and listeners seems to be that if that's the way the vowels are pronounced by our news readers, announcers and advertising voices, then that is the proper and accepted way to pronounce them. So the vowel torturing is becoming almost a national habit, to suit the "new Ireland," eroding the quality of Irish accents in the process. - Yours, etc.,
William J. Hayes, Carraig Hill, Roscrea, Co Tipperary.