A chara, - Although I am not an Irish speaker myself, I do respect the language, and try at times to improve my understanding of it. However, what I do not understand is the attitude taken by some Irish speakers as instanced in the letter from Roibeard O hUrdail (August 19th).
So some people pronounce An Post as "unpussed"; so what? That sounds exactly how I would pronounce it. So Luas is pronounced "Lewis". That doesn't sound too far off either. If Irish were to again become the everyday language across Ireland you would see variations of pronunciation as you do with English. I do sometimes get taken to task for pronouncing sandwich as "sangwich"; OK, so it's not the Queen's English (why would I want it to be?), but people know what I mean, otherwise they wouldn't be able to tell me what word I was mispronouncing.
I don't deny that the Irish language may not be given a great deal of prominence by RTE. In the same way, you don't hear many dialects on RTE. However, I don't think that creating some standard like the "Queen's Irish" is the way to restore the language.
If Irish were to become the language of the people again, Irish-language purists wouldn't be able to leave their homes for fear of hearing the language being "mangled" (and used) on every street corner. - Is mise,
Sean McGoldrick, South Circular Road, Dublin 8.