Choice on Irish
•I wrote a letter on September 23, suggesting people be allowed to pay an 'indulgence' to free their child from compulsory Irish. This money could be used to satisfy the special interests that forced the FG U-turn on making Irish optional.
Mr Doyle in the Irish Independent, September 28, wrote a letter stating that 70pc of Irish parents support compulsory Irish and that thousands of children attend Gaelscoils. I do not propose closing the Gaelscoils.
Mr Doyle's 70pc number comes from research sponsored by Bord Na Gaeilge (ie, you the taxpayer). They made a statement, "No real Irish person can be against the revival of Irish", and they found 70pc agreed.
This means 70pc (including myself) would not favour steps to prevent a revival if it was occurring. The other 30pc do favour steps to prevent a revival! Mr Doyle makes a giant leap from this carefully crafted statement to stating that 70pc are in favour of compulsory Irish and anything else done in the name of promoting Irish. Are 70pc in favour of massively expensive translation of all EU documents and proceedings into Irish?
The same research states that in 1990, 19pc of respondents were "strongly in favour of Irish". The people who would force Irish on the rest presumably are part of this 19pc but not all would be in favour as many see it as counter-productive. A better estimate, then, is that 19pc, or less, of the population in 1990 favoured compulsory Irish.
One would assume the number has fallen in the ensuing 21 years but I don't see any more recent surveys. I believe the respondents to this letters page are more indicative, with 5-10pc favouring compulsory Irish in schools.
We've had almost 100 years of compulsory Irish and it has been a miserable failure, producing kids who not only have learned very little Irish but actually dislike the subject.
There are 55,000 pupils in each year of secondary school and knowing one year out of the six is dedicated to Irish means we use up 55,000 child-years of secondary school on studying Irish every year (ignoring the Gaelscoils).
Total support for Irish language apparently runs to €1bn per annum. I am not proposing to cut that but simply to allow choice.
The pro-compulsory lobby is very keen to prevent any kind of choice. It feels it has the correct set of values defining what it is to be Irish and it will impose them on the rest of society.
The pro-compulsory lobby has many state subsidies and organisations and strict rules to assist it in imposing its values, which may partly explain its resilience as everything else has modernised.
To press FG to honour its promise of making Irish optional, I have created an email address called voteAgainstIrish@mail.com. If people email with 'I agree' as subject line I will present this as a petition to FG once the number exceeds 10,000.
GG Dalton
Dublin
Irish Independent
