Wales is like Ireland should/could have been

They don't know they don't speak Irish well, after bumbling through it for the guts of 20 years in school and never speaking it again? Give the general population the tiniest bit of credit - it's not a nation of simpletons. It's not Japanese, they hear it on the radio and on television all the time.

Most people are very up front about it if they can't speak more than a few words or understand very basic sentences in Irish. People are likely just being generous to themselves in the census responses, not genuinely deluded to the point of thinking they speak Irish like a Spaniard speaks Spanish.

Biggest case of grass being greener on the other side (of the sea) I've seen in a while. You were in gaeltacht equivalent of north Wales and heard Welsh being spoken. Wages are low so pints are cheap. You won't get same standard of pub as ireland though. Or standard of drink. The Welsh are and always will be very aligned to England. Anywhere near the border you will find huge amount of Welsh that think they are English and want to be English. Not a hope you'd find that in Ireland.

Like iteland, Wales has lovely countryside and scenic areas. But go into most of the towns, they are crumbling. I've been in north Wales and South Wales quite a bit, always thought it looked extremely run down. In fairness though, rural Irish towns are catching up.

Mao didn't want an empire, he wanted revolution and a unified China - and to be the boss. He claimed to be an anti-imperialist. The origin of British imperialism was different to Mao's political ideology. You can make a connection between the British and Ireland and Mao - it would be more useful to make the comparison between Mao and Stalin.

If Hitler got his ideas from the British - that turned out well didn't it. He seemed to have lost that subtlety you mentioned.

That has got to be one of the most ignorant posts on boards and that is saying something. North Wales is beautiful and there was a lot of Irish emigration to North Wales, Wrexham has a sizable Irish community, Parts of north Wales are a lot poorer than Ireland.

Ireland is way more modern than Wales. My defining memory of North Wales in particular was that it was like stepping back 40 years into some kind of 1970s time warp

Although I do think the progress we made infrastructure wise is slowing down.

I'm from North Wales, OP is right, from Caernarfon down to maybe Machynlleth the welsh language is used a LOT, The county of Gwynedd is very VERY pro wales/welsh language, bordering on flat out racism.

I used to do a mad job back home, went to visit a publican in Criccieth, he was from Manchester and bought his dream little pub, of course he checked the books before buying and it was thriving, the second he bought it custom just died, nobody went there purely because he was English.

I'm 100% Welsh but only speak very very basic Welsh, there's parts of Gwynedd/Mid Wales where people wouldnt talk to me because i can't speak Welsh with them

Ruthin is a bit different it's a well-off place. There is some chi chi, well of, fashionable bits of north Wales that have a significant amount of English living there or English who have second homes in the area I don't think they are the sort of places the OP is talking about.