I hit the streets of Galway to see how many people I could find who could speak Irish. Turns out, I found a good few! However, I got this comment on the video saying that fluency in Irish should be a requirement for citizenship, so I cut together some of my rejections during my time on Shop Street to illustrate how stupid that comment is. My thinking is that this person was trying to be xenophobic, not realising that a large proportion of the Irish populace is not "fluent" in Irish. In fact, there were some super interesting stats related to Irish in the last census, including the following:

Of a total population of 5,149,139 polled, only 12% were not Irish citizens yet 60% reported no ability to speak Irish. (Should we take citizenship from the remaining 48%? 👀)

Not only that, but people who "have Irish" but “never speak it” were up 55,000 to 473,000. (Should they lose citizenship? 👀)

Furthermore, 57,000 non-Irish citizens reported the ability to speak Irish; Australians in Ireland the highest with 15%, followed by Polish at 13% and Latvian at 13%. (Should they gain automatic citizenship? 👀)

Irish speakers are 55% female - Out of a total of 2.5M men in Ireland, only 844,000 reported being able to speak Irish. (Shall we boot out the remaining 1.7M men? 👀)

Younger generations are more proficient, with 62.5 per cent of those aged between 15 and 19 reporting that they spoke Irish either “very well” or “well” compared to 27% of Irish speakers aged 50-54. (Should we turf out the 73% in their 50s that can't speak it? 👀)

(I'm obviously being facetious, but I just want to point out the ridiculousness of this comment).

I'm all for the Irish language making a return and more people learning and feeling confident in speaking it, but everyone is welcome to learn and speak the language and those that wish not to, that's fine too. What we won't do is use our native tongue as an instrument of exclusion, thank you very much!

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Hi, I'm Clare and I make long and short-form content here on YouTube and livestream on Twitch. Find me everywhere @clisare and contact me at collab@clisare.com. Check out all my other videos!
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