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Threadjack, but I'm interested in the lessons drawn from this that can be applied to other language revitalization efforts. Young Cajuns usually find my partial speaking incredibly cool and wish that learning Cajun French was more available as an option.
And they successfully revived Hebrew in Israel. I don't know, I think it's some combination of bad timing and culture specific issues.
Re: bad timing, I will get some flack for this, but as far as I can see Irish and Scottish nationalism are heavily American- and returning-expat-influenced 'modern' nationalisms. In comparison to Israeli nationalism or Islamic nationalism, which are revivalist movements aimed at throwing off oppressors who prevented them from acting according to their ancient ways, they want to throw off the oppression of a British-tinged nationalism in order to become a modern, liberal, secular nation. The Irish people that I have known personally identified very strongly with chocolate-box Irishness but associated actual traditional Irish culture with backwardness and Catholic atrocities. There is a dislike of anything resembling ethno-nationalism that coexists uneasily with the explicitly nationalist (and anti-British) nature of the politics in both countries. Learning Irish is (I'm told) boring, compulsory, and was instituted by the bad old nationalists not the shiny new nationalists. It's resented in the same way that learning the Catechism is resented.
Re: culture, Irish and Gaelic were mostly spoken by the embarrassing parts of the country, backwards old country people that the cool crowd have no interest in associating with, and it's barely even spoken by those people. Learning Irish doesn't let you do anything cool, it's just something you have to put up with. The cool crowd therefore resent it, don't use it, don't make anything cool with it, meaning there's nothing cool you can do with it, and the cycle continues. A lot of Jews genuinely want to read the Old Testament and other religious documents in the original.
I'm aware that the above is really pretty insulting to Irish traditionalists. It's the anti-Irish-language perspective as I was told it by left-wing nationalists at an English university, recalled as accurately as I can and mixed with my own observations and those of an English acquintance who grew up in Ireland. Personally I think it's rather a shame.
TLDR: modern Irish nationalism is for various reasons surprisingly anti-Irish. Make sure that you have genuine ground roots support before making language teaching compulsory. Otherwise, sponsor making cool stuff in that language.
On the other side, if you learn Irish Gaelic, you can be translator of official EU documents into this language.
And no one will ever check whether your translation is any good, no one will ever read EU regulations of banana size and curvature in Gaelic. Dream job for life.
Standard translation process for major institutions, EU included, is that translated documents will get proofread and possibly QA'ed, so at least someone will read that document.
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https://toppandigital.com/translation-blog/welsh-road-sign-displays-out-of-office-message-in-translation-blunder/?amp=1
Seriously, though, government work is as far as you can get from cool.
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