This is the script for my video posted on September 14, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
About 72k people in Ireland speak the Irish language daily outside a classroom. In Wales, a country with half the population, the number speaking Welsh daily runs into the hundreds of thousands, and in Gwynedd it is still the majority language. Both languages have been shrinking for a century, but only one of them still has places where it is simply what people speak. So why did Welsh hold onto its communities when Irish didn't, and what does that have to do with geopolitics?
An Indo-European language we call Proto-Celtic spread across Europe in the Bronze Age or early Iron Age, and it eventually broke into branches. Irish and Welsh came out of different ones. Irish is Goidelic, along with Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Welsh is Brythonic, along with Cornish and Breton. They are related, but an Irish speaker and a Welsh speaker cannot understand each other. Six Celtic languages are spoken today, and two of them, Cornish and Manx, had to be revived after their last native speakers died.
English arrived with the Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169, though the lords doing the invading spoke Norman French. English was spoken by the settlers below them, and for centuries it stayed clustered around the colony.
Use of English contracted so badly at one point that the colonial parliament at Kilkenny passed a statute in 1366 forbidding English colonists from speaking Irish, wearing Irish dress, or marrying Irish families. It was aimed at settlers going native, and it was largely ignored.
In 1537, the Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language required English to be used in public and religious office. But English authority was thinner than the law suggests. When Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland four years later, the declaration had to be read out to parliament in Irish, because the Gaelic lords in the room would not have understood it in English.
The more severe measure came two centuries after that. The Administration of Justice Act of 1737 required court proceedings in English, shutting Irish out of the legal system completely. Northern Ireland only repealed it in 2025.
As English rule over Ireland grew stronger under the Tudor dynasty, English became the language of administration. Wealthy people spoke English, while the general population spoke Irish.
But this got worse in 1831 when the national school system began teaching entirely in English. Children caught speaking Irish were punished, often by way of a tally stick that recorded every offense. And many parents backed it, because they wanted their children to speak English.
Then the blight arrived in 1845. It hit crops across Europe, but British policy is what turned a crop failure in Ireland into a catastrophe, with food still leaving the country while a million people died of starvation and a million more emigrated away. This fell hardest on the poorest western districts, where Irish was still the everyday language.
Meanwhile, Welsh was also suppressed and faced cultural stigma, but Welsh had some advantages going for it. Perhaps the greatest of these is that in 1588, a man named William Morgan translated the Bible into Welsh, anchoring it as a viable language of literacy, worship, and print.
In the 18th century, an Anglican clergyman named Griffith Jones ran schools that moved from parish to parish teaching people to read in Welsh. By his death in 1761 they had taught over 150k people in a country of roughly half a million. And in the 19th century, nonconformist chapels made up around 80% of churchgoing in Wales, and those chapels and their Sunday schools operated in Welsh. There were newspapers, periodicals, hymns, and countless other texts all written in the Welsh language.
Ireland did get Irish scripture, but from the wrong direction. A New Testament appeared in Irish in 1602 and a full Bible in 1685, both from the Protestant Church of Ireland, and that Bible only ran to about 500 copies. They were instruments of conversion aimed at a Catholic population, which made reading scripture in Irish almost a betrayal. The Catholic Church, which served nearly every Irish speaker on the island, never produced an equivalent and increasingly ran its institutions in English. So in Wales, Welsh became a language people learned to read in, and in Ireland Irish became the language people spoke but could not read.
There are other reasons for the asymmetry, of course. The 1607 Flight of the Earls, the Cromwellian and Williamite confiscations of Irish Catholic land, and the Irish Penal Laws that marginalized and disempowered the Catholic majority all worked to destroy the Gaelic aristocracy and the patronage system that had sustained the literary Irish language.
By the 18th century, Irish had become a language of the poor. Welsh lost its gentry too, who Anglicized for careers and court connections after the Acts of Union, but it kept things Irish never had like its chapel network, a printing trade, and an ordinary population that could read the native language.
Not to mention, some argue that because Wales industrialized around coal, slate, and iron inside Wales, Welsh speakers moved to the valleys instead of moving abroad. Ireland industrialized too, but almost all of it happened in the northeast, around Belfast’s linen and shipbuilding industries, in the one part of the island that already spoke English. So Irish speakers often ended up speaking English whether they left the country or not.
When the Irish Free State was founded in 1922, it named Irish the national language, with English recognized equally, and the 1937 constitution went further to call Irish the first official language. The state pushed it through schools and the civil service. But this effectively turned Irish into a school subject and a compliance obligation while its use kept declining in homes, many of which simply didn't see the value in using a language they weren't fluent in.
Wales never got a state of its own, so Welsh never became a government obligation, but rather a means to rebel. Campaigners painted over English road signs, refused to pay the television license, and occupied transmitter stations. And when Margaret Thatcher's government reneged on its promise of a Welsh language TV channel, a former Welsh political leader announced he would starve himself to death. The government backed down in September 1980, and the Welsh-language S4C channel went on the air in 1982.
But while Irish languishes at home, it has been climbing elsewhere. Irish became an official language of the EU in 2007, but under a derogation that capped how much actually had to be translated. That derogation expired on the first of January 2022, and now all EUlegislation has to appear in Irish, and Irish language staff across the institutions went from 58 in 2015 to over 200 by 2022.
Wales went the other way. It is part of the UK, so Brexit took it out of the EU’s funding system entirely. The Welsh government says it is down more than a billion pounds against what European structural and rural funds would have delivered. The British government disputes the figure, but not that the replacement money is now controlled from London rather than from Wales. And the areas most exposed were in rural west Wales, which is exactly where Welsh speakers are densest.
Which is how housing became language policy. In Gwynedd this year, a community council backed a new affordable housing development on the condition that the homes go to Welsh speakers. The council's own planning officer said that would be illegal, because Welsh planning policy forbids discriminating on language ability, and the scheme went ahead without it. What is allowed is a local connection requirement, which says nothing about language but tends to produce the same result.
Ireland has its own version, since the Gaeltacht Act of 2012 already requires a share of new Gaeltacht homes to go to Irish speakers, and Sinn Féin has pushed to see it enforced. But Ireland is arguably more constrained here than the United Kingdom, because European free movement law is hostile to local residency conditions on housing. The European Court struck down a Flemish version of this in 2013.
Meanwhile, Ireland’s global soft power operates almost entirely in English. The truth is, speaking English natively is a tremendous strategic asset, because with the UK out of the EU, Ireland is by far the largest English-speaking economy left inside the single market. That makes it the obvious landing point for US firms that want access to the European market and a workforce they can hire without a language barrier. Basically, the Irish language and Ireland’s prosperity are somewhat at odds.
And Irish is not the worst case of this phenomenon. In the 2022 Scottish census, Gaelic speakers in the Western Isles fell below half the population for the first time, which means Gaelic is a majority language nowhere in Scotland. What Irish and Welsh show is that a language does not survive just because a state declares it official, and it does not die because a government banned it. It survives where enough people in the same place have a reason to use it. Irish ran out of those places, and Welsh, for now, has not.
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I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.