Heard Enda on the radio today after his meeting with President Obama. He answered the first question as gaeilge. I just about drove off the road!! It was beautiful!

I wonder if he is trying to placate the hordes.

Richard (Dick) Burke who piloted the first major down-grading of Irish in the education system and in the Civil Service (1972) spoke the most beautifully suave Irish.

His achievements are all around us. Even the Dept of Education has only a tiny percentage of competent Irish speakers now where once almost everyone could speak some Irish and many were fluent and enthusiastic.

The Leaving Cert has been lightened continuously since the 60s and 70s so that all the prose that needs to be studied nowadays are those few (once secret) passages that are chosen to be read in the oral exam. Rather than select them from larger texts that might be studied for pleasure, enrichment, or literary value, the exam passages are identified, extracted, distributed, and given to students before the exam. The texts themselves, once studied from cover to cover and line by line have been forgotten.

The main criterion in choosing a poem is its length. The shorter the more worthy of study. In the early 70s there used to be five or six novels on the honours Leaving Cert Irish course. No one was in any doubt but that it was a serious subject.

Yes. Dick Burke, that most urbane Irish-speaking gentleman, carried out a major hatchet-job on the status of the Irish language in our beloved republic.

So well might Enda speak Irish. He speaks so much Irish so well and so publicly that he could never be suspected of harbouring any ill-will to the language. He loves it too much to do it harm. Yes. It must be someone else who proposed downgrading it. His alter ego?

I sincerely hope I am wrong.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm no fan of Enda..not at all. But, to be living in America and hear Irish on my local radio station...well, that was pretty unusual and a welcome surprise on St. Patrick's Day.

Yes, I understand. There's a lovely photo in the papers today of Enda, his wife, Fionnuala, and Joe Biden. It is nice to see the good relations between the US and Ireland continue. Yesterday was a happy proud day for Irish people at home and abroad.

There are problems here at home however. Gaelscoileanna are to lose the pupil-teacher ratio they used to enjoy in order to compensate for their difficult conditions and their lack of any recognised source of additional funding. Most Gaelscoileanna serve a region rather than a parish or local neighbourhood.

Ordinary English-medium schools have powerful support from the Patron -- formerly the Catholic Church -- and the local community. Gaelscoileanna never enjoyed the confidential Government-Patron discussions prior to schools being allocated to new communities.

All Gaelscoileanna must plead for recognition after decisions on the school requirements of an area have been taken by the "authorities," who wouldn't dream of planning for Gaelscolaíocht unless forced by local demand, and some -- Ratoath, for example -- must survive for a long, long time in unsatisfactory surroundings and depend on the parents and language enthusiasts to pay the teacher's salary and other costs of running a school before gaining official recognition.

Hitherto the Department of Education, surprised that anyone should want education through Irish, granted a generous pupil-teacher ratio, to enable such a new school to get established.

Now that has been withdrawn and teachers will lose their jobs and Gaelscoileanna will lose teachers and children will find themselves lost in large classes. All that in addition to the miserable conditions in mouldering prefabs or disused buildings designed for other purposes that are a feature of so many Gaelscoileanna. [Ara! Why don't they just send their children to the English-medium schools like everyone else!]

Forty years ago when the ordinary schools abandoned teaching through Irish in "the A-stream" -- and when Richard Burke had removed the requirement for Irish in exams and in the Civil Service -- parents had to seek education through Irish elsewhere. At that time the Department officials were delighted to see parents making a stand for Irish and indicated they were "pushing on an open door."

Now that those oldtimers have all retired and the new "couldn't-learn-its" are in charge that door has become very stiff and no new all-Irish schools have been permitted in recent years.

This first decision of our new Government bodes ill for the sector and for the language. I can just imagine the discussion at the Cabinet table "Preserve Irish in the Gaeltacht. Forget the rest. They're only floggin' a dead horse."