A little understanding
Sir: Mr Gerry Adams blames the British for the failure of the Irish to save the Irish lan- guage. The mayor of New York wants his city's schoolchildren to be instructed in the horrors of the Irish famines and the equa- tion of them and the British to the Holo- caust and Himmler. Now we have Mr P J Kavanagh, poet and writer of things Irish, accusing you, sir, of being 'illiterate' and 'seriously stupid' for your reference to the Irish language as 'a native patois' (Letters, 16 November). Your parallel assertion that 'English was once a patois too' went unre- buked on the grounds, presumably, that such an assertion was true.
Mr Kavanagh added that such 'snobbish contempt [of Irish culture and history, pre- sumably] breeds anger, conflict and mur- der'. We certainly have had all three for far too long from his fellow Irish thundering their contempt, as he puts it; and his use of the present tense seems to promise us a lot more of the same. Is it not time for these angry old men to stop their thundering and living in the past and get on with a little nurturing of the understanding which Mr Kavanagh seems to want? That understand- ing could include the clear identification of those ancient manuscripts and that corpus of poetry, 'one of the oldest and riches in Europe', which you, sir, have apparently so contemptuously questioned.
Peter Chettle
2 New Cottages, Bighton, Alresford, Hants
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