The Long Decline of Gaeilge
When Catherine Connolly stood before cameras this October, newly elected President of Ireland, and promised to make Gaeilge the “working language of the Presidency,” her words carried both poetry and unease. For decades, the Irish language has sat at the centre of national sentiment yet at the margins of daily life. In a country where fewer than seventy thousand people use Irish outside school, her vow sounded less like revival and more like reckoning.
Ireland’s relationship with its own tongue is a quiet tragedy of survival. The British Empire tried to erase Gaeilge; famine scattered it; and later, independent Ireland smothered it under bureaucracy and exams. By the 1950s, generations could conjugate verbs but not converse. The 2022 census revealed that nearly two million citizens “can speak Irish,” yet only one in twenty does so daily. Real fluency now lives mostly in the Gaeltacht communities of Donegal, Galway and Kerry, where English fills playgrounds and workplaces.
The decline wasn’t sudden but slow, polite, and bureaucratically managed — the kind of cultural erosion that happens while everyone claims to care. The state’s 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010–2030 promised to rebuild usage through education, technology and community life. Fifteen years later, progress is modest. Students memorise grammar rules, parents seek exemptions, ministers blame globalisation. But Netflix didn’t kill Gaeilge — indifference did.
It’s tempting to fault newcomers — Poles, Brazilians, Ukrainians, Portuguese — for changing the cultural fabric, yet the Irish abandoned Irish long before migration began. The collapse of daily use dates to the 1960s, when economic modernisation made English the language of opportunity. Ironically, many of today’s migrants attend free Irish-language courses through libraries and community programmes, learning out of curiosity and respect. There are no grants, no visa perks — only the wish to belong.
Every administration has sung hymns to the Irish tongue while quietly underfunding its survival. Teachers struggle with overloaded syllabi, students see no reason to speak the language they study, and even official helplines that display bilingual logos often answer only in English.
Can a President Change the Sound of a Nation?
Connolly promises to change that pattern. She calls Gaeilge “the heartbeat of our shared identity — ancient and new, local and global,” and vows to bring the language from the periphery to the centre of Irish life. Admirable words, but words alone cannot shift economics. Reviving Gaeilge means confronting a global truth: Ireland markets itself as English-speaking, tech-ready, investor-friendly. A bilingual public service sounds noble until someone calculates the cost.
Nowhere is the contradiction clearer than in Connemara. Road signs gleam in lyrical Irish — An Spidéal, Carna, Ros Muc — yet cafés greet customers in English. The Gaeltacht survives more as heritage than habitat. Locals switch tongues for tourists who come on “immersion retreats” funded by the same state that allowed their schools to close. Even the famed summer colleges, once crucibles of teenage fluency, are shrinking. Funding covers only part of costs, and host families earn less than in ordinary tourism. The Gaeltacht Authority runs on nostalgia and goodwill. Each new census reads like an obituary for a living language.
If President Connolly truly intends to revive Gaeilge in modern Ireland, she must transform symbolism into structure. Irish must not just decorate official letters but inhabit them. Adult learners need more than slogans; they need incentives, accessible courses and visibility. Youth in the Gaeltacht deserve the same investment Ireland gives to start-ups. Irish-language creators online — podcasters, TikTokers, filmmakers — need funding as cultural infrastructure, not hobby money. And above all, migrants should be invited into this revival, not blamed for its absence. The Irish language cannot survive as an ethnic relic; it must become a shared bridge.
Ireland has always loved its ruins — dolmens, round towers, Celtic crosses against the Atlantic sky. Tourists photograph them reverently; locals drive past. The language risks the same fate: a beautiful ruin, maintained for display but rarely used. Connolly’s poetic call to unite the ancient and the new might change that, or it might become another monument to good intentions. If she succeeds, Gaeilge may finally move from slogan to sound — from museum display to living speech. If she fails, Ireland will remain officially bilingual but conversationally monolingual, a nation fluent in self-forgetting.
The stones of the Gaeltacht will keep their silence either way. But the question echoing through every classroom and café is brutally simple: what kind of country keeps forgetting its own voice — and still calls that progress?