English has been spoken in at least parts of Ireland since the House of Normandy arrived in The Pale, so perhaps the transformation hasn’t been all that rapid. :’) The population of Ireland that speaks only Gaelic, basically no English at all, has been getting more and more rare, but still can find someone bilingual to talk with using Gaelic. If there were a Gaelic-speaking population outside of Ireland, it might be worth having that offered at the high school level even here in the US. But there isn’t. Gaelic (both Scot and Irish, they’re very similar anyway) isn’t that much different in distribution from Norwegian, which is almost entirely spoken in Norway, and has relatively few speakers for a European language.
The husband and I visited Ireland in 1996. On the day that we took a ferry to one of the Aran Islands, we rented bicycles there and rode around some non-touristy areas. The Arans, of course, were always one of the more remote parts of Ireland, and, thus, less subject to cultural changes than areas on the mainland.
Two memories from that day that relate to the use of Irish there:
We stopped at a tiny pub where they never saw any tourists. While we were there, a man in his 30s came in to have the barmaid read something for him. He was able to speak English, but he could read only in Irish.
On a rather deserted stretch of beach, I struck up a conversation with a man who had three young children out for a romp among the rocks. He was living there as part of a government program that had relocated him and his family from Dublin. Apparently, the program was meant to address both overcrowding in the city and emigration from the islands. I assume the fellow was on the dole, as there were not many jobs to be had there at that time. Thus the large emigration numbers.
I wonder how much crime some of the new settlers brought, and I’d be curious to know how many of them took up the fishing and farming tradit ions of the islands. Tough work in most parts of the world, but really demanding in the Aran Islands. Also, can’t imagine that any of the new immigrants added to the numbers of Irish speakers.