Sir, - Your editorial (August 23rd) concerning the Irish Gaelic language at The Queen's University, Belfast seems unconsidered. Your leader writer appears to have little experience of Northern Ireland beyond certain clubs in West Belfast: I have never head Irish Gaelic spoken at QUB, a university where the majority of students are from the RC/nationalist community. In Northern Ireland as a whole, use of the Irish Gaelic language is indeed below that of Cantonese. It is but a tiny fraction of the proportion who speak Welsh in Wales or Euskara in the Basque Country.
The Fair Employment Commission acted to protect minority sensitivities in much the same way as it did years ago regarding pictures of Her Majesty The Queen at Shorts Brothers, despite the majority of the people working in both environments probably appreciating the symbolism. The Irish Gaelic signs in Queen's Students' Union were tokenistic and played no useful part in the promotion of the Irish Gaelic language.
That was not why they were put up in the first case, of course. They have served their purpose. The so-called protection of minority rights at QUB resulted in the minority becoming the majority. Protestant employment in the Students' Union has been driven down below 15 per cent. Careers advisers in state schools, recognising that the signs were just the outward manifestation of a campaign to drive Protestant students out of the Students' Union and, ultimately, the University as a whole, began advising their students to apply to other universities, including, ironically, Trinity.
Your editorial is incorrect to state that students and staff only began raising the issue in the last few months: on the contrary, every Unionist candidate for office in the Students' Union mentioned the signs in his/her election address in every election since the signs went up. The issue only came to head when the employment figures were published. The decision to take the signs down has been taken by a nationalist Students' Union Executive and has been supported by the Union of Students in Ireland.
Where your editorial becomes an uncharacteristic polemic is when it states that the English language is an expression of the tribal affiliation, cultural identity and political aspiration of the unionist majority in Northern Ireland. If this was the case then there would hardly be a problem in Northern Ireland. On the contrary, the Irish language is not Gaelic, but those variations on the English language which are actually used by the people of Ireland.
The Irish Times, with its tenderness towards minorities has forgotten that Protestant unionists are a minority at QUB. Did The Irish Times devote an editorial to the plight of unionist students when the national anthem was dropped from graduation ceremonies? Of course not. Rather than dwelling upon past grievances the whole Queen's community must turn away from the process of depriving the other tradition of their symbols and work towards finding ways of making all the students of Queen's, regardless of their cultural, religious, political or linguistic background, feel cherished. - Yours, etc., STEVEN A.W. KING,
Senator, The Queen's University of Belfast, University Rd., Belfast.