Interesting times for the linguistic liberal intelligentsia. They are having a hissy fit over the suggestions of Eoin Butler (and others.) He suggests that (a) teaching Gaelic languages is a waste of time and (b) most of the Irish have always spoken English. This is clearly wrong, especially as it's undermining their chosen right to tell people what they should do and how they should behave & speak.
"Eoin Butler feels that we need to face up to the realities of where Irish is today. Irish language policy, in his opinion, has been the single biggest policy failure in the history of the state, and in this film he pulls apart some of the myths and clichés that exist about Irish, in an attempt to try to better understand the situation we are in. "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrg_xuJZsDQThere is some comedy in this. The EU is busy creating laws, which are officially translated into Irish, the official language of the land, before being send to Dublin. This is creating a significant number of brand new Irish words that never existed before. Then, because most of the Irish MPs can't or don't speak Irish, the new laws have to be translated into English before they can read them (if they can or do).
He does make some interesting points though. Like, despite decades of Irish being the official language in Eire, and millions of IR £/euro being spent on compulsory education of the language, the proportion of the population that actually do speak Irish (as their primary language) is still declining.
Sadly, this does chime with some basic psychology. The easiest way to piss-off youngsters is to make something compulsory. It just encourages an aversion to the subject. It would be far more psycho-tactically effective to ban it; then let them be subversives in a secret guerilla war to keep their heritage alive. See Basque etc.
What's the TME relevance? It's a great example of what happens when you try to impose a language on a population. Like perhaps (for example) "Anglo-Saxon" on the olde-worlde Brits?