Sir, - "Beatha teangan i a labhairt" - the life of a language is to speak it; and if the language is not spoken, but relegated to learned tomes in libraries, text books and abstruse rules grammar, it is doomed to die. It is as simple as that.
With the latest furore over the poor results in Junior Cert Irish (as inevitable as the annual imeacht na bfhainleog) it is blatantly obvious that Irish is not taught as a living, breathing language, to be used, understood and enjoyed in the normal interplay of everyday life. Our record of actually speaking a language other than English is poor - and what a travesty even the Queen's lingua franca has become with apostrophes everywhere they shouldn't be, and atrocious spelling. There are comparatively few students who leave secondary school with respectable fluency in just one Continental language. Yet we seem surprised, even shocked, at their lack of expertise in Irish.
Dare I suggest that it would be interesting to do a little research into the fluency of teachers in the languages they purport to teach? How many would pass the quality test of being at home with Irish, French, German or Spanish?
But what really kills the language is hostility - or worse, apathy - on the part of parents and perhaps, teachers too. Burdened with our post-colonial, kingsize inferiority complexes and shame about our past, and swept along on a tide of imported media, mainly English and American, it is little wonder many of our young people couldn't care less about their own language, or its place in the world of today. After all, nobody speaks it; so why bother?
Small children imbibe knowledge and language like sponges. For them there is no problem with any language whatever. They just imitate, first their parents, then their teachers, and I maintain that if infants arriving in school hear nothing but their own language, spoken naturally and unselfconsciously, they will accept it as naturally as the air they breathe.
This is happening in Gaelscoileanna all over the country, with enormous success, whatever jaundiced views Kevin Myers may have to the contrary. Wouldn't the little tots be amused at his difficulty with "bean" and "mna"! But if we are really serious about saving our language, when is it going to be the living language of the Dail and the everyday affairs of State? It is one thing for politicians to give lip service. It is another thing altogether to put their aspirations where their mouths are. - Yours, etc.,
Vera Hughes, Moate, Co Westmeath.