Professor John McCafferty:

I think it is very laborious and a lot of work. There are two issues about which I have been talking to colleagues lately. First, there is the language issue in and of itself and second, since the spelling and alphabet reform in the 1960s, the number of people who can read the seanchló is declining. We are seeking to create new generations of researchers and scholars who can do that. The reality is, and it sometimes hurts us to admit this, we probably will have to translate. We will need to undertake fairly large acts of translation. We are now in a position - this is hurtful perhaps to one's psyche - that there are no monoglot speakers left. I spent the summer in Connemara: there are no monoglot speakers left. There is no one untouched by English and so must live in a bilingual environment and deal with the consequences of that and act appropriately. The most important thing is that we give people access to their collective memories.