Re: Justine McCarthy's article on the Reform Movement

I want to correct some errors in JustineMcCarthy's article on me and the Reform Movement (Village, 11-17 January). Had Justine phoned me, I would have told her I am neither the chairman nor a spokesman for Reform. I wrote a letter to the Guardian newspaper in a private capacity. But my views are more than grounded in reality. Sinn Féin took over the Gaelic League in 1915 to de-anglicise the Irish. As Jack White wrote in Minority Report, "WP Ryan expressed the confrontation in a single sentence: 'We are working for a new Irish civilisation, quite distinct from the English.'" It strikes me that this was an anglophobic statement.

White went on, "Gaelic society had been shattered before 1700. The new civilisation would have to be built, presumably from the fragments that survived in the peasant cottages of the south and west.... It would have to express itself in a language unknown to a majority of the nation...” As we know, after 80 years of force feeding, this project ended in a conspicuous failure. The Irish chose not to speak Irish. They “bashed” it, not me.

Compulsory Irish was opposed by the Protestant community. Kurt Bowen  in Protestants in a Catholic State wrote: “No other government policy provoked such widespread and sustained criticism from Protestants.” But official Catholic Ireland ignored the protests of the Church of Ireland's board of education over 40 years. And the requirement of a knowledge of Irish was used to oust Protestants from senior jobs in government bodies post-independence, as Myles Dillon wrote in University Review in 1958, Volume 2.

Compulsory Irish was a serious mistake in psychology. I believe the state should now support Irish as a subject of choice and that it should be an equal official language to English in our constitution.

The continuing pretence that it is the first language of the state will only undermine whatever general good will still remains and, as recent research shows, will soon guarantee its demise as a living vernacular.

Robin Bury, Killiney, Co Dublin