Why does Ireland speak English?

Spot on. I hear ads trying to push Irish ( better called Gaelic) where it's stated that learning can be 'fun'.

This really irritates me . The 'fun' angle in teaching/learnng will take you as far as advanced baby talk and that's that.

The other problem which few observe is that there is no large scale native speaker community in which one could immerse oneself to comunicate freely and spontaneously across all the domains from news and current affairs to tachnology , law , business ,health ,environment etc.

But even if there were ,the abiding question overhangs it all -why in God's name would you do it ? Leaving aside eccentrics , hobbyists etc -for the ordinary run of people it would be an unnecessary and futile waste of time. They would be learning an imperfect copy of what they have pefectly already

The Gaelic Revival Lobby ( conscious of their need to continue in business) exist in a world of illusion and denial.

They twist statistics every which way and no one in the media has the wherewithal to challenge and expose them for the con artists they fundamentally are.

It's a cottage industry of well connected people who have been milking the state since its inception to fund their hobby horse and further their careers. And government have to shovel money at them, or risk the blackmail of "abandoning" the language.

Not at all. This idea of certain nations not be able to master foreign languages etc…. is not true. It's a question of motivation.

That's kinda the point of the sentence you're replying to.

We don't master foreign languages because there's no real need to as we already speak the most widely spoken common language in Europe. And also, we are an Island nation who's nearest neighbour also speaks English as their first tongue.

And we don't master Irish, because it's useless other than as a kind of badge of honour. Outside of an extremely small enclave (usually quite a smug small enclave), there's absolutely no opportunities to speak it in anything other than at a child's level. So, it's pointless other than as a hobby. Which in and of itself isn't a bad pursuit.

On the other hand I've been to many places in Europe and 90% of people I've met have been very good at speaking English. This is because they know that they'll need it on some level. This has been more and more essential as I've gotten older and the economy has become more global over my lifetime.

As I said, many Europeans could spend all day thinking, speaking, reading, listening to, looking at English material if they wanted.

If I put my mind to it, I could probably master German. The thing is I'd need the time to put aside to do that. However, on the list of things that I need to do, it would be quite low. I might, when I retire, put the time and effort into learning it properly. But at the moment I don't have the motivation.

It could be just as well asked, why does a section of Scotland speak Scottish Gaelic, which was imported from Ireland?

From 1066 till around 1400, English itself ceased to be the governing, legal, religious language of England. No laws in English, no books in English, none of the upper class spoke English.

Irish suffered the same fate as Welsh, Cornish. Manx and even Scots.

Almost none of the Irish diaspora speaks Irish, as they are mostly live in Anglo-speaking countries.

Middle class welfare like most of the NGO’s. Pretending to care while milking the system for every penny they can pocket for themselves.

I once volunteered as a census enumerator, 2006 if I recall correctly. Nere, ever again.

Anyway, I came across numerous native Irish speakers who refused to take the Irish version of the form after giving it a once over.

The complaint was that the language used was unnatural, as if a second rate dictionary was used to translate the English version directly into Irish. Civil Service Irish is how one lady described it.

I'd say of the 10/15 people who reviewed it only one took the Irish form.

Not remotely a fair comparison. Hebrew was revived because people wanted to speak it and cherished it as part of their heritage. Irish people just like to pretend that Irish isn't dead and funnel billions off to people who have no interest in reviving it. If Irish people cared about the Irish language, we wouldn't be having this conversation in English.

Too much of the Irish language policy, unfortunately, is about giving jobs and money to those who already speak Irish, there's little chance of a revival in any true sense of the word. Examples often given of the "success" of Irish language policy are things like its recognition as an official language of the EU. But this just means more money for existing Irish speakers doing the translation, and does nothing for Irish as a living spoken language. No one is going to learn Irish so that they can read EU documents translated into Irish.