Madam, - As we say farewell to another year, I would like to thank your regular columnists in particular for their important service to the community at large. Producing a high quality essay each week that is relevant, topical, intellectually stimulating and challenging and which helps the reader to get a handle on complex matters, consolidate woolly thinking and construct a coherent and balanced view of the topic in question is an unenviable task of which this reader, for one, is most appreciative.
Your coverage of events in the Irish language is also, no doubt, greatly appreciated by readers of The Irish Times, though it is surely a small minority who are able to read these articles without difficulty. A view of modern Ireland through the perspective of the Irish language is unquestionably something of interest to all people living in Ireland, Irish and non-Irish, or who wish to retain contact with the language - however tenuous - or who have children trying to learn Irish at school.
We all fear ghettoisation of any kind and are pleased when visitors from other cultures speak English and use our own colloquial and idiomatic language to mix and communicate with greater ease. To this effect, could we appeal to your generosity to grant space (even in small print) alongside columns such as Tuarascáil for a translation into English? The non-Irish readers among us and those of us with no Irish would at least have access to the unique perspective of our writers in Irish (the undersigned couldn't get a handle on chunks of the recent Tuarascáil about Mark Twain and had to ask my brother, who wrote it).
Those of us who do have some Irish would have the added satisfaction of being able to limp along in the original without losing the way. - Yours, etc,
GREG ROSENSTOCK, Monkstown, Co Dublin.