Madam, - Hilda Geraghty's suggestion (May 19th) that the "Cló Gaelach" should be brought back into use is an attractive but perhaps not a very practical one.
I can't agree with her, however, that Roman typefaces are not part of the "true self" of the language: the first book ever printed in Gaelic (Edinburgh 1567) used Roman, as did books published in Brussels (1639) and Dublin (1736) as well as stories by Douglas Hyde (Rennes 1895), a version of Fr O'Leary's Shiana (Dublin 1914) and the Official Reports of the Dáil since 1920.
On the other hand, the first New Testament (1603) and the first Bible (1685) were published in a typeface of which about half the letters were based on Irish manuscript and the rest were Roman. This hybrid style admitted the séimhiú, so the awkward use of "h" to show an aspiration was almost avoided.
If that is an important objective, then the way forward may lie with a more recent hybrid, the "Cló nua-Rómhánach" used by the Dolmen Press to republish "An Béal Bocht" in 1964. This fount is the familiar Times New Roman, but with the letters "f" and "t" newly-cut in Gaelic style, i.e. without their ascenders. This meant that all lower-case consonants had room for a dot, so the problem of the jungle of Hs was solved.
The only fault I would find with nua-Rómhánach is that the designers also kept the dot on the "i", with the result that the text looks ever dottier than Myles may have intended. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL DRURY, Brussels, Belgium.