Madam, - It is high time that the Gaelic enthusiasts took their heads out of the sand and realised that the national language will never be anything more than a curiosity in Europe.
Under the impact of modern communications, minority languages are losing ground all over the world. Israel is the only country that comes to mind as having successfully resurrected a dead language. The good sense of the Irish people has ensured that the attempt to do the same with our own has failed.
To continue to pay lip-service to the idea is damaging, pointless and expensive. Our real national language is English, and we should be thankful to history for it, as it gives us a built-in advantage that many other struggle to attain.
The backswoodmen have always maintained that English is a symbol of British imperialism. In the Civil Service and in the teaching profession this antiquated attitude has long been converted into a pseudo-patriotic entrenched, vested interest which militates against progress. To get a job as an inspector of English in secondary schools, one is required to be proficient in Irish. This reduces the number of available qualified applicants to such an extent that the job can be given to an unsuitable person. This culture is self-perpetuating.
The dominance of English as a world language is now obvious. In India, the government attempted to make Hindi the lingua franca, but Hindi was seen as a sectional language, spoken mainly in North India, and English has won through. Even in China, with little tradition of British colonialism, English is the primary business language. In South Africa, students who speak Afrikaans at home have to become proficient in English because many essential books are not printed in their own language. These are but three examples from many available. I would like to point out to the rabid Gaelic nationalists that all this has little to do with Britain but a lot to do with the economic power of the US.
Travelling on the Rathmines bus you hear a great many languages in addition to English. Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Russian and other European languages are common. I do not remember when I last heard a word of Irish. Yet the front of the bus has an Irish destination name incomprehensible to most of the passengers. - Yours, etc.,
BRIAN COWLEY, Leinster Square, Dublin 6.