A chara, - May I, with respect, take issue with John Deasy, TD (Opinion, August 21st) who complains that provisions of the Official Languages Act are "a monumental waste of money"?
As I see it, the Act is a very belated attempt by Leinster House politicians to give some element of justice to both Irish and English. The alleged waste of money lies in the translation costs of documents "which nobody reads". If nobody reads them, why publish them in either language?
Were they to be published only in English, as Mr Deasy wants, discrimination would be involved. Eventually, as has been the case for decades, Irish would be thrown once again to one side.
Let us please be clear on this: All we Irish speakers seek is equality, opportunity for equality, official standing for equality, active, obvious, and growing country-wide equality, in print, on radio, on TV, on public spending, in the Oireachtas, at local authority level, during elections, in church, and in public whenever people gather for business or pleasure.
Mr Deasy in his article gives an example of that inequality in his reference to a secondary school which was "nurturing Irish speakers up to the age of 13 and then abandoning the whole thing". Dia linn!
Earlier he writes of the secondary school head who couldn't understand "why the Government had invested in gaelscoileanna when they weren't prepared to fund the completion of studies in Irish at secondary school level".
In fact, governments and civil servants consistently have opposed the founding and development of gaelscoileanna.
This was only too evident when a few of us in the Blackrock-Dún Laoghaire area organised to provide primary education for our Irish-speaking children.
For years, Scoil Lorcáin had the minimum co-operation from Church and State.
The gaelscoileanna organisation might care to list here other examples of lack of government co-operation in providing for education at all levels through the medium of the Irish language, despite the support for that language in the Constitution and the Languages Act. Support tends to be given by one hand and withdrawn by the other. Translation, and provision of translated school texts, is lacking, or slow. And why do we have to depend entirely on translations from the English?
All human beings are entitled, under human rights, to a respect for their own dignity and, likewise, for their languages, including Irish.
Is it so difficult to extend that respect to our own tongue and its speakers? After all, Irish is about the only thing that we really can call our own. - Is mise,
DEASÚN BREATNACH, Baile an Chnoic, Dún Laoghaire, Co Átha Cliath.