A thousand years ago, Irish Gaelic was spoken by the entire population of Ireland. Today, it is spoken by a few thousand people. The first part of this chapter discusses how this language shift came about, focusing on historical changes in population due to various waves of colonisation. The second section describes a number of linguistic features which make Irish Gaelic distinctive. At the morphophonological level, these include consonant and vowel alternations and initial mutation, and at the syntactic level, (mainly) VSO word order and the two verbs to be: the copula and the substantive verb.

By contrast to Scotland and Wales, Ireland should be more fertile ground for the promotion of new speaker interests. This is because Ireland is an independent state and as Irish is the first language according to the constitution, it has been used within the education system for far longer than has Welsh or Gaelic. Moreover, the statutory education system features the teaching of Irish as a core subject which has created a social mass of 1,761,420 people – 39.8 per cent of the population – who can speak Irish, according to the 2016 Census. The overwhelming majority of these would be learners and a significant proportion would be assumed to be new speakers. However, the 2016 Census shows that, of these, only 73,803 – 4.2 per cent of the population – used Irish daily outside of the education system. Special attention is given to the role of government departments, Foras na Gaeilge and An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaiohta in promoting Irish and responding to the needs of new speakers.