Wales is like Ireland should/could have been

The amount of natural forest compared to here you see from trains passing through makes me sad, same in England though

The big difference is that the number of people in Wales who claim to be able to speak Welsh (30%) is considerably less than the number of Irish people who claim to be able to speak Irish (50%), but many of those Welsh speakers have Welsh as their native language and use it on a daily basis.

It makes logical sense that using a language on a regular basis is one of the key ways of driving adoption.

The typical response here is that "It's the way Irish is taught!", and while this is true, it's probably a bit too simplistic. My experience of learning Irish is that you go from learning the basics of the language in Junior Primary, to basic reading comprehension in Senior Primary, then into actual reading comprehension in secondary school. All with very little practical use of the language.

Every successful language course in the world concentrates on practical usage of the language before getting into the complexities, the spelling, tenses, verbs etc. We try to teach Irish in the same way that we teach English, but that doesn't work because practically none of us enter school with a single word of Irish. In order to drive retention of the language it needs to be in active use. This is why we all remember snippets of the Irish phrases that were used every day in school ("An bhfuil cead agam dul go dti an leithreas mas e do thoil e"), and not a whole lot else.

Examination is also a mess. Remember the Aurals? A mixture of accents from all over Ireland. Imagine a non-English speaker doing an English Aural exam with accents from Kerry, Bangladesh, Yorkshire and Derry. A native English speaker would struggle with that. It's batshit crazy when you think about it.

How we make this better, I don't really know. But I know driving wider use of the language seems like a no-brainer. Perhaps all the way through school conversational Irish should be at the centre. At the beginning of primary school it's a topic of its own, but over time it gets expanded so that a certain percentage of the day is taught in Irish, and by the time you get to secondary school, at least 2 hours of the day are taught in Irish.

We know that languages are learned better when they're learned earlier, perhaps it should be in at the deep end and from junior infants your day is entirely bilingual, so within 3-4 years it is completely and utterly natural and normal. There would be no stigma with the kids then. They wouldn't see talking to each other in Irish to be stupid, something that only losers do.

You could trial this in schools in various small towns (< 5k people) around the country, along with reliefs/grants for businesses that make an effort to operate as Gaeilge, public events conducted entirely in Irish, open education for adults to polish up and encourage them to use the language daily, etc etc.

I'm using duolingo at the moment to bring my Irish back up as the kids are learning it in school, and while I'm finding it immensely helpful, the lack of opportunities to actually use it day-to-day is really glaring.

I take it you didn't go anywhere near Rhyl, OP?

The father-in-law used to work for Irish Ferries and got us a free trip over so we made a cheap holiday of it with the kids about 10 years ago. The deprivation was palpable. Honestly felt like being on-set for the Welsh re-make of Shameless.

Regarding the Public Amenities, Wales is about a fifth the size of Ireland (and not the whole island of Ireland).

An interesting thing about Wales is that it is probably the most atheist region in Britain or Ireland. There is no Church of England there and they have no actual official religion.

It's a bit puzzling that they are so integrated with England, given that they are a Celtic nation and have their own language. That may change in future though : if Scotland and NI were to leave the union, they could well be tempted to leave themselves.

There is no official religion in Ireland either, nor does the Church of England have much of a profile as well.

Parts of Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire in the south west have long been traditionally English speaking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsker_Line

Wales is one quarter the area of the island of Ireland.

I think generally that Wales was subdued a very long time ago and given their proximity to England they couldn't hope to escape. So they concentrated on cutlural independence in those areas that were not overrun by English. In Ireland, we are surrounded by water, we never really resigned ourselves to being run by the English. The consequences of this struggle for freedom were more severe and the Act of Union and the Famine dealt the language a fatal blow. But most of Ireland did escape the malign influence of London and achieved the economic growth that is missing in Wales.

She is a titular monarch. It shouldn't need to be explained.

Lived in N Wales for 4 years. It's true that you hear Welsh every day but that isn't true for the rest of the country. As for public amenities I wouldn't say they're any better than Ireland.

One thing that was glaringly obvious was the amount of the population who were deprived. There seemed to be a lot more of the population who you could class as being poor. All-in-all Ireland has a lot more going for it.

The Welsh are lovely though and I have great time for them. A lot in North Wales would love independence but accept rightly or wrongly that it's not feasible. The English are not well liked at all but they don't seem to have any conviction that they can go it alone which is kind of sad in many ways.

In any case the OP was in Caernarfon and compared it to Ireland. That would be like a tourist going to Westport or Killarney and thinking they were representative of a typical Irish town. Believe me, most of the towns in Wales are grim, full of crap pubs and charity shops.

machaseh, you may not be aware of the exact history but the simplistic explanation of one contributory factor to the language issue is that Britain basically pillaged and raped Ireland for centuries, leaving its people mainly destitute. As a foreigner, you may have heard of the "famine" too (which wasn't a famine so much as a managed genocide ... and there were a few such famines, not just "an gorta mhor"). As a result, the only future people saw for their children was through emigration. This even continued after the foundation of the state and up to the 1990's. If you were in Ireland in the 19th century, it was better for your children to learn and speak English so that when they emigrated they would have a better chance. Over in England or the US or Australia.

If you go to the US you will quickly see evidence of the sheer number Americans claiming Irish heritage. Good luck finding a sizeable Welsh American influence. The Welsh stayed at home. There wasn't the same need to supplant their native language with English.