>>17790031 (OP)>welsh succeeded where Irish failedIreland had a very different 19th and 20th Century to Wales.
>1800sMost speak it, huge areas are mongolot Irish. Most people live in extreme poverty, and the language is continually suppressed. However, the Emancipation movement's leaders (many of them Irish Catholics) encourage Irish people to ditch the language and just learn English to try and better their lot in life-many do this, due to aforementioned extreme poverty.
Then the 1840s and the potato blight arrive, which are the most devastating to the south and west where the stronges population of Irish speakers are. In the aftermath of that carnage, people are all the more keen to better their societal standing-so they learn English. Irish is nowhere; there isn't an Irish newspaper, there aren't famous Irish writers, it's mostly carried in localised communities.
We arrive in the 20th century to yet more turmoil, but a revival movement does burst forward that's tied to Irish nationalism. However by the 1920s when Ireland became independent:
>very few actually speak it>every institution, newspaper, piece of literature, signage, etc has been in english for centuries>speaking english has been labelled as basically the only pathway to prosperity in Ireland for approximately 100 years, meaning wherever the language isn't being suppressed it's being abandoned>the vast majority of Irish people now speak English>Catholic Church didn't even start doing liturgies in Irish/English until the 60s (obviously)Remember, all of the above when in 1911 around 0.3% of the population were mongolot Irish speakers.
Harsh truth, but most people aren't linguists nor big culture-heads and don't want to spend the time and effort to learn a new language when more pressing material concerns are present. If the population all spoke different languages, Irish could have been a unifying force as was the case elsewhere-but most spoke English and Ireland was in the Empire until the 1940s.