Irish deserves strong support
Márta 20, 2013
Your editorial (Mar 13) would be comical if it were not so ill-informed.
You offer no evidence for the alleged €1 billion annual spend on Irish. How is this quantified? Is money spent on childcare (good) through the medium of Irish (bad) included? Are schools which don’t teach Irish for more that 20 minutes a day included?
You quote the budget of TG4, which gave us Ireland’s first teen drama and myriad quality TV shows, in comparison with RTÉ Two, for example, which costs much more and adds very little to viewer choice in its rebroadcasting of foreign shows.
Is money spent on gaelscoileanna a spend on education (good) or on Irish (bad)? Does it cost more to ensure that public servants serving Irish speaking areas are bilingual? Answer: No.
Our appalling English-only attitude has left us the odd man out in Europe with no respect for either our own history, culture and language or that of anyone else. Consumerism has not lead to happiness. Self-confidence and self-worth will. Time to see the value of our language, and of ourselves.
Irish has no intrinsic monetary value or use, much like Shakespeare, ballet and laughter. Irish is not much used in working life, like calculus, integration or the history of WWII.
Are we all to be trained to be unthinking cogs in a wheel? Each language is a different way of thinking. We need to think in a different way. And had you checked the record you would see that more Irish is spoken in the European Parliament that Maltese, Estonian or Latvian.
Dáithí Mac Cárthaigh BL
Law Library
Dublin 7
www.irishexaminer.com
