Madam, – Sean Hayes’s assertion (September 7th) that “nobody” knows if all writers in Irish are bad is verifiably false, since some of them are good enough to retain this nobody’s interest. I recently enjoyed An tAthair Pádraig Ó Duinnín – Bleachtaire (by Biddy Jenkinson), a work I bought in a bookshop. It will enhance my enjoyment of future walks in Wicklow.
Reading it caused me to postpone my reading of Ambler’s classic thriller Cause for Alarm, which I found well-promoted in my local library.
In my experience, many librarians in Ireland do not take the care for minority interests that Mr Hayes attributes to them generally: in contrast, on my two visits to the Library of Congress, spaced 35 years apart, I was easily able to locate some Irish books (in Irish).
There used to be a class of bookseller who loved books and their readers, catering for those with diverse and eclectic interests with an aura of respect that is somewhat thinly caricatured in Mr Hayes’s assurances of goodwill and Gaelic salutations.
And what exactly is peculiarly Stalinist about marketing something one wishes to sell? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – As a writer in the Irish language, I am eagerly awaiting Sean Hayes’s order for any of my books so that I can join my colleagues on the disproportionate shelves of his bookshop. Better still, he could order them direct from Coiscéim, one of the publishers which commits the heinous crime of passing on to the authors the stipulated proportion of the support fee they receive for publishing books in Irish.
I can assure Mr Hayes that if the said fee were divided by the hours an author spends in writing a book, not only would there be no profit involved, but the minimum wage legislation would be lying in tatters around the word processor.
As for his claim that “a small community of ‘critics’ review books written and published by their colleagues”, is the same not true of books written in the second official language of the State? – Yours, etc,