I've met a lot of people from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Only a handful of the much older Irish individuals I met could speak the ethnic language, it seemed. Younger people knew a bit of it, but not much.

So... whether or not the Irish language is important, that fact is that either way, the language is dying. Should it be preserved? Who decides that, I don't know.

If you look at this topic through a broad lens, it probably doesn't matter much for humanity that a language spoken only by a small number of people is dying away. If you're a preservationist or a romantic though, it's probably a tragedy. There's a sense of loss when something unique and beautiful is deemed obsolete.

Globalism is a thing, however. Even before we used the world "globalism", aspects of smaller cultures were swallowed up by and erased by more dominant cultures. It's not just small numbers of Irish people speaking Gaelic that are affected. Even in large, powerful countries, like Germany, native languages are being superseded by English.

I remember when I went to Germany as an exchange student, and I could barely speak the language worth a damn, I'd constantly detect English words or phrases when native German speakers were having casual conversations amongst themselves. American culture in particular was so influential that Germans that weren't even talking about the US would insert American cliches or cultural references into their conversations. I'm talking like... an entire quote from a Hollywood movie in the middle of a conversation about normal, everyday German stuff.

The world is homogenizing these days, thanks to technology, and it's natural that little eccentricities in human culture that might act as an obstacle to that homogenization process will be done away with, like rare languages. I can respect and appreciate the fact that Irish people are preserving their native language, but the global trend that is happening right now is not going to stop. There is going to be a single world culture very soon and anyone who wants to think small and local is going to get swept aside by globalists. My prediction is that within 50 years, the majority of the earth's population will speak the same language.