AFAIK (did an internship in Dublin), irish children still learn Gaelic in school, but not in a way that’d make them able to talk to each other in it, much like Germans in some schools chose to learn latin. You can use the language to decipher old pieces of history, but not to talk about how your day was.
I’ve never heard about dealings with the government that could only be done in Gaelic. Everything I did was in English.
Gaelic is compulsory for both primary and secondary school which means that almost everyone will study it between the ages of 5 and 16 (minimum school leaving age). It says something about our approach that all but a very small minority of school leavers are effectively unable to hold a conversation in the language.
It's been compulsory since the formation of the Irish state during that time the percentage of actual spoken Irish (as well as general Irish comprehension) has continually dropped. Given that the actual aim of this was to promote the language I think it's safe to say it's been an unmitigated disaster.
My personal take on this (I went to an all Irish primary school so I was fluent) is that there's two factors here:
1 - The way it's taught is absolutely terrible. There's a focus on the grammar and structure of the language rather than actually speaking it. This means that students associate it with memorizing genitive and dative cases which is pretty boring. This means the student don't like it. Some of those students grow up to be the teachers, and they've got a negative attitude to the language. Wash, rinse repeat for 90 years and you get to where we are now.
2 - There's no economic incentive to learn the language. Unless you're living in a gaeltacht (nearly all in very rural areas) you're almost never actually going to be able to use it. It's not present in any other country and apart from having conversations which foreigners can't understand, isn't useful. There are reasons to learn it but they're cultural or academic rather than practical.
There are signs of regrowth with more and more all Irish schools popping up but my impression is that it's become a middle class status symbol to be able to speak the language so we'll see what happens there. There's also been discussion about reforming the syllabus to split it into conversational Irish (compulsory) and 'academic' Irish (optional)
As for dealing with the government, you're permitted (not obligated) to conduct all of your business with officials through Irish and demand that they do the same with you. We have two versions of our constitution, one in Irish and one in English. In the case of any discrepancies, the Irish one takes precedence.
I heard somewhere that if you give your name in Irish to a Garda (Irish police) and the case goes to court (say you are pulled over for speeding or something), the court case must be conducted through Irish (the Irish state has two official languages - English and Gaeilge/Irish).
This could be a hilariously clever way to run down the statute of limitations as barely anyone in the country speaks Irish, and that includes judges and barristers. I think the Gardai have to pass a certain minimum level of Irish to get into the Garda training college. This could be just an urban myth though, so take it with a pinch of salt.
Wow, Gaelic has to be one of the most unintuitive languages in the world to pronounce.
I've read that word probably a hundred times in various news articles, and always pronounced it in my head as Tao-Seech, which I'm assuming is ridiculous to Irish ears.
I'm a bit interested in Irish culture so I've informally learned some pronunciations here and there to see if I could start to get a handle on Gaelic words: the only pattern seems to be that I'm always wrong :)
The H on the end confuses people because it's usually not really a H, it's a modernisation of the séimhiú.
I can't find any decent articles on it, but basically it used to be represented by a dot over the letter it was affecting. Unfortunately I'm not good on the recent history of the language, but the change was made some time in the last 40 years (between my parents attending school and me attending school).
The reason we have so many vowels is to match broad vowels (A, O, and U) and slender vowels (I and E) across consonants. I'm fairly sure this was a change introduced in recent history too.
