Sir, Unlike Grainne Duggan (letters, November 4th), I have rather less faith in an English-speaking Ireland retaining its own identity than she has. Has Mrs Duggan not noticed the disappearance of distinctly Irish words and phrases in our vocabulary only to be replaced by American vernacular culled from cable television? I most certainly have.
Our traditional music remains a despised craft for most Irish people, except for that unique music-hall nonsense that American tourists keep requesting at "traditional" singalongs in bars. Our dance remains a mystery to fully 90 per cent of the population, who can nevertheless waltz and boogie as well as any Viennese or New Yorker. As for our history, Ms. Duggan should really go out on the streets and ask Seosamh Bloggs what he knows. She's in for a rather rude awakening.
As Ms. Duggan so rightly points out, "the predominant use of English doesn't seem to have been too much of a barrier to America in establishing its own unique identity". Let her turn her television on, and compare Beavis and Bullhead's jargon to an average Irish teenager's slang. I rather suspect she will realize that America is most successfully exporting this culture (a media-based, consumer-oriented and profit-driven entity) to the detriment of other English-speaking societies.
Ms. Duggan might be surprised to know that the two Irish classes I teach here, on the American prairies, are consistently booked out months in advance. A certain proportion of my students are Irish-American, and the most common reason they give for studying Irish is that they wish to reclaim a vital part of their identity.
This isn't to say that Irish people should learn Irish to insulate themselves from outside, but there is little doubt that English-speaking Ireland is losing its identity. Just listening to RTE announcers dropping their r's, and laughing like Oxfordshire horses, has me convinced of that.
Few enough people would say a Berliner was particularly German if he couldn't speak German, or a Parisian was particularly French without French. Obviously I could ask your readers to draw a similar conclusion about Dubliners, but it's not that simple. We do have to live in a bilingual siloation - like Canadians and Belgians - but the simple inconvenience of Ireland's majority culture being English-speaking in a tiny, media-driven world means that English-speaking Ireland is disappearing as a unique culture, and that's a great shame.
Is mise, le meas,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US.