Language
Irish is a Celtic language and is closely related to the Gaelic languages of Scotland, Wales and Brittany in France. An estimated 83,000 people who live in Gaeltacht areas of Ireland (areas, especially in the west of the country, in which Irish Gaelic is the designated language) use it as their first language.

Elsewhere, Irish is spoken by some, undersood by many, but seldom practised on a daily basis. In Dublin, a new, independent radio station, Radio na Life (Liffey Radio) was launched in 1993 in response to the growing demand in the capital by Irish-language speakers for their own station. A few years later, Telefis na Gaeilge (TnaG), a national television station, broadcasting exclusively in Irish and making many of its own programmes, was launched and seemes to be surviving in an increasingly commercial broadcasting environment. Despite, then, predictions over the past twenty-five years that Irish is a dying language, it seems that the revival in interest, among young people in particular, many of them in Dublin, will guarantee its survival as a living, minority European language.