Gaelic Is a Right

GAEILGE Abú!

John Spain’s column, “Gaelic Is Such A Waste” (September 6, 2006) reminds me of conversations you’d hear in the teachers’ faculty lounge. “You can’t blame the poor kid, look at the parent.”

The child, who is exposed to violence in the home often picks fights and acts out in the classroom. And the one who loves to read, and values museums and ballet, most often brings this appreciation from the home. It seems to me that that this columnist’s children and their peers hate the Irish language because of their parents’ views.

True, the pictures in the Irish textbook reflecting “the new Ireland” seem over the top. And Mr. Spain is quite right about political awareness being carried too far.

But to refer to any language as being “completely pointless” is really sad.

The war is pointless. Learning a language is not pointless. It is a right.

Is it not the right of children the world over to learn and speak their native language? Is it not the right of Irish children to learn theirs?

Maura Mulligan
West New York, New Jersey

Gaelic Is Ridiculous

I JUST want to say “here, here” to John Spain for last week’s column on the ridiculous regulation forcing Irish kids to learn a dead language, namely Irish.

I’m ashamed to say that after 14 years learning this so-called “first language,” culminating with a “C” in honors Irish in the Leaving Cert in 1987, I still can’t understand the Nuacht whenever I’m listening to RTE on the Internet.

What’s the point of forcing someone to learn a skill that doesn’t help them in later life? If parents want their children to learn Irish, then those resources should be made available.

However, the resources spent on forcing primary school children to learn Irish could be better used to teach them a useful language like French or German while their cognitive skills are still developing.

By the time they get to secondary school it’s too late for them to grasp foreign languages in the same way that their continental counterparts learn English and other languages through their primary educational systems.

I just came back from a visit to Ireland, and had the pleasure of visiting the Aran Islands for the first time. On that trip I learned that the children there are not conversing in Irish with each other anymore, but in English.

So if the children who grow up in the most remote of Gaeltacht areas aren’t speaking this dead language anymore, why should children who have no exposure to it outside of the classroom?

It’s time for Irish parents to grow up and start demanding their educational system serve their children, and not some outdated ideology!

Dermot Murray
Bedminster, New Jersey

Cliffs Are God’s Gift

CORMAC MacConnell’s column “The Wild Week That Was” (August 30-September 5) when he spoke about the Cliffs of Moher is so right.

We viewed the Cliffs of Moher for the first time on February 9, 1989. It was dusk and we were the only people standing on the rim.

The peacefulness and beauty were amazing. We stayed locally and came back in the early morning to see them in a different light, still alone except for a herd of goats.

We go to Ireland often and have seen it change yearly. Having to pay to park, the large and then larger shops, and now a high priced cave to view the beautiful free gift from God, the Cliffs of Moher. Please!

Barbara and Dave Breternitz
Dove Creek, Colorado

An Inconvenient Truth

THERE is a Cork expression that goes, “He’s a cute hoor.” Cormac MacConnell in last week’s issue about President Bush stooped to the level of that nefarious behavior of the cute hoor.

MacConnell is a Bush hater but can’t be straight about it. In his self-absorbed narcissistic whining about inconveniences caused to him by President Bush’s visit to Ireland and the Bush-provoked loony protesters at Shannon over U.S. troop movements through there, he asked us to forgive him if he sounds anti-American. This damning of our president and pleading for forgiveness at the same time is the mark of the cute hoor.

We here in America like it straight from the shoulder, whether you are damning or praising us. Bobbing and weaving doesn’t cut it. Cuteness won’t deceive us.

As far as the U.S. fight on terror goes, MacConnell and his Irish counterparts in the Irish media and academia live in the ivory towers of abstractions in a small country that has little or no real international involvement in this area. The president of the most caring and powerful nation on the face of the earth lives where the rubber hits the road.

It has hit the U.S.’s road no less than six times across the world starting in 1993, where it again culminated in 2001 at the Twin Towers in New York with the slaughter of 3,000 people and untold economic damage. Bush and any other leaders are only trying to do their best to protect the nation’s people.

As a substitute for his selfish obsessions about inconsequential inconveniences, MacConnell might read Georgina Brennan’s interviews in the same issue on the fifth anniversary of September 11 with the family of the mother and her child who were on their way to Disney World and were unlucky to be on one of the hijacked planes that was murderously piloted into the Towers.

That report might catapult MacConnell out of his inane and psychotic preoccupation with silly inconveniences.

John Rogers
Voorhees, New Jersey

British Famine History

IT is nice to view history in terms of one’s lifetime, including the overlap of a previous generation or two, as letter writer Peadar O’Fiach did in his letter “Don’t Blame the British” in the August 23-29 issue. Written history, however, paints a broader picture.

With regards to the Famine, one can understand that the Irish people did not place blame on the English for their misfortune basically because the Irish people are a humble people, whether by nature or by hundreds of years of subservience is for others to answer.

If, during the time of the Famine, the local Irish people were considered backward, as Mr. O’Fiach states, it begs the question as to what the overlord government of England had been doing for the previous 700 years to improve the lot of their Irish subjects.

And if one sees the hand of God in the Famine, surely one must see it in Katrina. Does it mean the ruling government is entitled to sit idly by as a spectator? Or act responsibly?

About the export of convicted criminals to the colonies, there is a vast difference between a “convicted” criminal and an “undesirable” who was taken randomly and sent into slavery – the practice espoused and practiced by Cromwell and his troops in his ethnic cleansing program of Ireland. (One has to wonder if the “convicted” was any more than an “undesirable” who made it into the court system.)

Criminals were supposedly allowed to work off their time in the colonies. Slaves were the property of the owner for whatever purpose or time he deemed fit.

Does any of this history condone the wanton killing of innocent people? Absolutely not! History is history.

But then there are agitators who can never leave well enough alone, such as the Orangemen in Northern Ireland with their annual parades, spewing hatred by rubbing salt in a wound that is trying to heal. And the government of England allows it.

If, in a comparative context, legions of Americans from northern cities (Chicago, New York, Boston, etc.) converged and marched through southern cities (Richmond, Charleston, Birmingham, etc.) every year, year after year, celebrating the end of the Civil War, would the people or the government of this country sit idly by?

J.P. Duffy
Moraga, California