Madam, - For sheer stupidity, Donal Flynn's letter of May 9th takes some beating. The whole purpose of education is not what youngsters "want". Youngsters "want" to learn neither English nor Irish. But because they are exposed to English from day one, they absorb it without knowing it. Later learning becomes easy.
The State's failure to follow the widespread use of immersion education - successful employed in most bilingual countries - prevents this absorption as far as Irish is concerned, leading to resentment among a minority of students.
But it is the inability to practise Irish outside the school - thanks to the relentless economic persecution of the language through history - that, together with the failure to properly immerse them in Irish early on, prevents the majority of well disposed students from maintaining spoken Irish later on. Hence the embarrassment of Ireland being the only country with an indigenous language whose inhabitants can't speak it.
By the way immersion students are not only better at Irish, but better at English and other languages, as well as being generally smarter too. Our woeful - and almost unique in Europe - inability to learn other languages well stems from the little-Englander mentality of the likes of Mr Flynn.
If such attitudes prevail, we are headed for a moronic and lobotomised cultural future. From being a cradle of culture, we will be nothing more than a footnote in Anglo-American cultural history. - Yours, etc,
MARC COLEMAN,
St John's Close,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.