In Ireland, all schoolchildren must study Irish through primary and secondary school, and must attain a passing grade in the Leaving Certificate to matriculate at an Irish university. One would think that all these years of compulsory schooling would generate widespread fluency in the language—but only a small percentage of Irish people actually speak the language in daily life. Many more emerge from school with a lifelong hatred of it!

In recent years, Irish seems to have transitioned from being the language of the benighted peasantry to becoming a marker of cultural distinction. As a result, many yuppie parents now send their children to a "Gaelscoil" ("Irish-language school"), at which everything is taught through the medium of Irish. Gaelscoils are also thriving due to large-scale immigration from Eastern Europe over the past decade, which has turned regular primary schools into linguistic logjams for students and teachers alike. Many parents now believe—perhaps correctly—that regular primary school teachers spend too much time teaching the children of Poles, Slovaks, and Lithuanians to speak English. There's a widespread impression that children master more actual content at the unilingual Gaelscoils.

As for learning Irish, the best way to start is by taking a summer immersion course in one of the Irish Gaeltachts. Otherwise, you'll find a decent range of books, CDs, etc., on Amazon that will give you a good grounding in the language.

MB, that's interesting.

I asked a Filipina whom I met this summer if she spoke Tagalog. (Her English was flawless but very slightly accented.) She said that she learned it in school but that in the Philippines there are more than 100 dialects and they did not speak Tagalog in the home. Schooling was actually done in English. When she runs into countrymen here they sometimes try to speak to her in Tagalog but she has to ask them to slow down and she mostly doesn't understand them.

The names Sextus and Cornelia (and the fact that they are arguing) tell me that the textbooks are the excellent "Ecce Romani" series that my daughter used. The stories were very entertaining.

I’ve studied Irish and the biggest problem, as with learning Latin, is the lack of an immersion experience. Bi-lingualism with English is basically 100%, and so you will never, ever, be in a situation where you are truly compelled to speak the language. Furthermore, even in the most intact Gaeltacht regions (and I’ve spent time in Gaeltachts in Donegal, Galway and Kerry), you will find it difficult to get people to speak with you. Nessa Ní Chinnéide has written in the book Who Needs Irish that in Gaeltacht communities, "as soon as a stranger comes among us, people will speak English. Visitors who actually speak Irish find this intensely irritating, and those who come in the expectation of hearing what Irish sounds like find it disappointing." That seems exactly right to me.

I also strongly take the point about the Gaelscoil emerging as more prestigious. I spent a day at a Gaelscoil in Dublin a few years ago, and I was amazed at the degree to which the students cared very little for the language, and were hearing basically none of it at home, or anywhere outside of school for that matter. The deal is probably different in Gaeltacht schools, although sometimes I wonder. Much the same is true of the French immersion system in Canada, which many Anglophone parents see as a way to get their kids away from students they see as “the dregs.” Konrad Yakabuski wrote in the Globe and Mail recently that such parents want their kids immersed all right, but not necessarily in French.

I started learning Irish by using the Teach Yourself Irish book and tape set; it’s very basic, but worked well for getting me started. You will need to go to the Gaeltacht if you want to get at all proficient, though. The Gaeltacht college I’ve spent the most time at is Oideas Gael, in Donegal: http://www.oideas-gael.com/ They’re very into spoken Irish (so you don’t get a lot of grammar) and are very non-neurotic and welcoming (a lot of people from Northern Ireland – including a surprising number of Protestants – come there to learn for the first time, since they didn’t get it in school in the same way as their cousins in the Republic). I can’t speak highly enough of their work. Good luck!