Sir, - Our first Minister for Education, Eoin MacNeil, showed remarkable prescience when he said, in 1924, "You might as well be putting wooden legs on hens as trying to restore Irish through the school system." Yet there was no doubt that he loved the Irish language and fully appreciated its importance.
Seventy-five years later we can appreciate how right he was. The Department of Education has done everything in its power to restore the language. We have all been taught the language. We have all been given the words. If we wanted to, we could speak it. The obvious conclusion is that the vast majority of us are quite happy to leave the survival of the language in the hands of the enthusiasts.
Perhaps it makes sense in a rapidly changing world to look forward and outward rather then backward and inward. - Yours, etc., Michael Gorman
Park Avenue,
Sandymount,
Dublin 4.