The creeping prominence of the Irish language

If you could quote somewhere in this thread, or any where on the site really, that I complained people who wanted to were doing something through Irish that'd be great. You do you, just leave those of us not interested in a dying language out of it.

The Irish forms should be smaller on, for example road signage, in order to reflect the de facto usage of the two main languages of the state. It's as simple as that.

I was accused of "standing around crying" because people were doing things through Irish so I asked for proof of that. The post probaly could use an extra comma or two.

I don't participate in any aspects of traditional Irish culture, I've been exposed to plenty of them but they never held my interest.

I stopped looking into Irish history in junior cycle, the long series of defeats got a bit repetitive.

Yeah, our culture is unique, just like everyone else's.

Spanish and French are both very recognisibly Romance, and speaking one makes it incredibly easy to learn the other, despite whatever changes have occurred in them over the last 2000 years.

Today, most English vocabulary is non-Germanic, and the verb system is highly simplified, whether as a result of Scandinavian influence or French - or both.

Speaking only English, the average person will not pick up German or Dutch in a few months just by being there and hearing it around you: but this will happen to the average person moving between French, Spanish, Italian - or between German and Dutch.

It varies with the language; and being a motivated adult is very different to sitting in a schoolroom where there is no guarantee that either the teacher is competent (and many primary teachers are very poor at Irish) or that the pupil is making an effort to learn.

The 5,000 contact hours are supported by Canadian studies into bilingual/immersion education in Canada; also by studies in the Basque country where they discovered that bilingual schools only produced a minority of functionally bilingual kids.

So people here can tell us what we should know after X hours of instruction in Irish - based on nothing more than their individual opinion (which curiously seems to generally be hostile to Irish) - or we can go with serious academic studies into the matter in foreign countries and then try to extrapolate their findings to Irish.

So first we force Irish speakers to learn English, and having done so, we then use that as an excuse to deny them services in Irish?

Sounds like a good definition of facism to me.

Language is a tool, plain and simple, there to allow us to communicate with our peers, when that tool no longer fits the job it's no longer useful. The arguments about history and culture are really only relevant for the content, not the language you use to record it or express it. In fact if you think there is more value in maintaining those cultural elements in a language a tiny percentage of our own country speak, let alone zero outside it, then you're missing the point of your own argument. Similar to the history argument being used, having had or used something in the past doesn't mean you need to today. Also comparing this to languages like French and Spanish is pointless, besides both of those countries not natively speaking English to begin with they are in use in other countries around the world based mostly on colonial history. Irish is nowhere else, and again even here only truly spoken by an absolutely tiny minority.

I respect some people want to use it and for their kids to learn it but it should be completely optional and not treated like a core part of our internal systems. Ditto if you take some pride in it, I do in my model collection, each to their own. But I do resent this being compulsory on official documents, announcements and in schools when the time could be freed up for other more useful topics that the child and parents can choose (before you jump on this very clearly 'choose', if they still want Irish fine but if it was me I'd use the time for learning to code).

"I never said the onus was on you to provide state services"

"I'm assuming you can speak Irish fluently, you could offer your time to teach a class or start club or any number of things through Irish."