Sir, - It is difficult to understand why Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, September 18th), a very readable, well-informed and amusing columnist normally, has to be vulgar and offensive when writing about Irish (or indeed his other aversions): enthusiasts "gathering in covens to mouth it to one another", "Teilifis de Lorean", etc. And then exaggeration is followed by innuendo: "tens of billions of pounds having been spent on promoting Irish"; "virtually no one in the Dail can understand it"; "catastrophic decline in interest and enthusiasm" (when was all this enthusiasm there?); "we can bully and beat children to speak Irish"; "compulsory linguistic engineering".
He mentions a recent class in The Irish Times in the same breadth as all-Irish schools, a useless comparison. In his second paragraph he clearly wishes to give readers a picture of all pro-language activists as ignoring "the actual reality of what is happening to the language". Is not the reverse true: that it is they who are most likely to be aware of the reality and be distressed by it? Many Irish speakers are so pessimistic that even the harmless expression of fond hope irritates them every bit as much as it does Kevin Myers. - Yours, etc.,
Diarmuid Breathnach, Sidmonton Gardens, Bray, Co Wicklow.