In July, the European Union’s rotating Council Presidency will issue official communications in the Irish language, alongside English, in a historic first. Government ministers from Ireland, which chairs the Council for the second half of this year, will be encouraged to say at least a few words in Irish when they initiate or conclude a session.

Paradoxical to the point of comedy

It’s a high-water mark for Gaeilge on the world stage, but it’s also a moment that throws the language’s deepest contradiction into sharp relief. Constitutionally, Irish is the Republic of Ireland’s first official language, English merely the second. Yet the vast majority of the Republic’s five million inhabitants speak English first, or English only. According to the 2022 census, fewer than 72,000 people in the entire country use Irish daily.

The situation of the Irish language is paradoxical to the point of comedy. It is the most officially protected minority language in the EU and the subject of a genuine cultural renaissance — and an endangered tongue that by the cold arithmetic of census data could lose its last native speakers within a generation. Irish is having a moment. It is also running out of them.

A vivid picture of language retreat

It’s a demise long foreshadowed. The map sequence above paints a vivid picture of Irish language retreat.

• In 1800, Ireland was almost entirely green: Irish was the daily language of the great majority of the island’s population. English footholds only in the east: Belfast and Dublin, and their wider hinterlands.
• By 1850, the Great Famine had not only reduced the population through starvation and emigration but also accelerated the advance of English across Ireland’s midlands, as far as Sligo on the west coast.
• By 1900, the Irish-speaking areas were a ragged patchwork of smallish standalone zones, clinging to the island’s western and southern shores.

Ireland revolted against British domination: culturally, with the Irish Revival of the late 19th century, and politically, by gaining independence from Britain in 1922. Irish was cherished as part of the new state’s heritage, and as a marker of distinction from its former colonizer. Generations of Irish schoolchildren studied the language of their forebears. But to little avail.

• By 2000, the solid patches of the Gaeltacht — the areas where Irish is actually spoken — had almost entirely melted away. Most surviving enclaves are too small to shade on this map; they can only be circled.

Cool like Kneecap

This is one of the most dramatic instances of language retreat ever mapped in Europe. Even the emergence of a state dedicated to protecting Irish could not halt its near-disappearance.

Set against that history of decline, the current cultural spotlight on Irish is almost surreal.

Kneecap, the Northern Irish hip-hop trio who rap in Irish, have arguably done more to make Irish cool among twentysomethings than any government initiative ever could. Their story was made into the film Kneecap, which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival — the first Irish-language film to do so.

Back in the Republic, pop singer CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) opened her 2025 album “Euro-Country” with an unmetered refrain in Irish. A decade ago, that would have seemed earnest if not downright cringeworthy. Now it just sounds cool.

On the big screen, 2022’s An Cailín Ciúin (“The Quiet Girl”) became the first Irish-language feature to receive an Oscar nomination, and the first Irish-language film ever to gross over a million euros at the box office.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

In the 2026 Netflix comedy-thriller How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, Irish is used as a private code, deployed in front of an English speaker who cannot understand it. It’s a role that Irish has played for centuries. Just never before on a global streaming platform.

Demand for Irish is climbing as fast as the language’s growing visibility. At any given moment, around one million people are learning Irish on Duolingo. More than five million people outside Ireland have begun a course. (As anyone familiar with the platform knows, “begun” does not mean “continued,” and the Irish language’s famously irregular grammar will have thinned the herd considerably.)

Offline, the London Irish Centre has over 2,000 people on its waiting list for Irish classes. City Lit, one of the UK’s largest adult education providers, reports that Irish is its second-fastest-growing language course, with enrolments up 57% year on year.

Inside Ireland, the “pop-up Gaeltacht“ movement — informal Irish-language evenings in Dublin pubs — has been going strong for nearly a decade. Irish-medium schools (Gaelscoileanna) have grown from 16,000 students in 1990 to over 52,000 today. Trinity College Dublin’s Irish-language society has over 450 members, making it one of the university’s largest.

Dead poets and difficult exams

Behind all this lies a generational shift in attitudes. Older generations, who were force-fed Irish at school, came to associate it with dead poets and difficult exams. Gen Z and Gen Alpha associate Irish with authenticity, decolonization, and yes, cool bands. Fluency in the language has also become politically significant. In October 2025, presidential candidate Catherine Connolly’s command of Irish was cited as giving her an edge among young voters over her rival Heather Humphreys, who doesn’t speak the language. Connolly won.

All of which adds up to a picture that matches the encouraging green of this map, one that fans of Irish reach for when they want to feel good about the state of the language. The Republic is almost uniformly shaded in various greens, with only Northern Ireland noticeably paler. The map shows how many Irish people reported to the census that they could speak Irish. In most areas of the Republic, the figure is at least 25%, and upwards. Nationally, in 2022, nearly 1.9 million people — 40% of the population — reported they could speak Irish, up more than 112,000 since 2016.

Those are remarkable figures for a language once dismissed as a peasant tongue, pushed to Ireland’s western edge and to within an inch of its life. The healthy greens on this map are a testament to what public education and government policy can achieve.

The gap between “can” and “do”

Or are they? What the map doesn’t say is that “can speak” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The question is self-reported, and since Irish is compulsory in school, everyone who can conjugate a verb or order a cup of tea in Irish is entitled to answer yes. That is not the same as using Irish as a daily means of communication. For that, we need the next map.

Change the census question from “Can you speak Irish?” to “Do you speak Irish daily, outside of school?”, and the previous map’s reassuring greens drain away almost entirely. The Republic turns a sickly pale. Color survives mainly in parts of Donegal, the Connemara coast, and on the Dingle peninsula.

The daily-speaker figure is currently around 72,000 nationally, which corresponds to roughly 1.5% of the population. Of those, around 20,200 live in the Gaeltacht; even there, the proportion of residents who speak Irish has fallen from 69% in 2011 to 66% in 2022.

Extrapolate those trend lines, and the arithmetic becomes alarming. With daily-speaker numbers declining census after census, linguist Conchúr Ó Giollagáin warned in 2015 that Irish as a living language — as opposed to a school subject, Duolingo hobby, or urban identity badge — could be gone in about 10 years. That would be…about now.

Others, pointing to the younger age profile of some Gaeltacht communities and the modest growth of urban Irish-speaking households, call predictions of the imminent demise of the language greatly exaggerated. But based on the available data, no one can argue that the trend is moving in the right direction.

The after-effect of centuries of colonization

How is this possible, given the scale of government investment? Not only is Irish the Republic’s first official language, and compulsory from primary through to secondary school, it is required for entry into the civil service, and it is supported by its own radio station (Raidió na Gaeltachta) and TV station (TG4), and a range of promotional bodies.

Perhaps all that effort was part of the problem. For generations, compulsory Irish produced tedium and disgust. Irish was something you had to do, not something you wanted to do. The language became, in the eyes of the Irish establishment, a heritage item: cherished in principle but underfunded in practice; an internalized ambivalence that is the after-effect of centuries of colonization, as one newspaper columnist scathingly described it.

How to pull up Irish out of its death spiral? The way other European minority languages manage their survival can be instructive. When the Irish look across the water to Wales, they see a fellow Celtic language that is thriving by comparison.

The Welsh-language revival is, by most metrics, the most successful in Europe. The Welsh government targets one million Welsh speakers by mid-century — a number currently around 843,500, of whom 430,000 speak it daily. The crucial difference is institutional follow-through: Wales has backed its language ambitions with sustained, substantial investment across the entire education pipeline, from nursery to university. Targets are published, monitored, and adjusted.

Breton, the Celtic language of Brittany in France, tells a different story. France actively suppressed regional languages in schools, courts, and public offices well into the 20th century. In 2024, Breton had around 107,000 mainly elderly speakers, and it’s shrinking fast. Despite the growth of Breton-medium schools, intergenerational transmission has largely broken down. The lesson: education without daily community use is a holding action, not a revival.

Frisian, spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland by around 350,000 people, offers perhaps the most stable equilibrium any European minority language has achieved: co-official status with Dutch, taught in schools, present on road signs, used daily in shops, on farms, in local government. The key ingredients appear to be geographic concentration combined with genuine official bilingualism.

Time is a good storyteller

Those who fight for Irish deserve to celebrate when their language echoes through Brussels from July. But the question is whether there will still be a living Irish-speaking community left the next time Ireland assumes the Council Presidency — or the one after that.

The challenge is that, when it comes to language survival, neither institutional entrenchment nor cultural enthusiasm is a sufficient replacement for community transmission.

Where minority languages survive, the evidence suggests, it is because of sustained investment, early and well-funded education, and a critical mass of speakers concentrated enough to pass the language on naturally — at home, without an app.

Will Irish survive and flourish, or will it be loved and studied as a badge of Irish identity – but not passed on? At present, both futures are still possible. Which will prevail? Time will tell. Or as they say it in Irish, and rather better: Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir (“Time is a good storyteller”).

Strange Maps #1291

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