Can People From Northern Ireland speak Irish?

I spoke to a number of people from Northern Ireland about how the Irish language is treated and viewed in the ‘six counties’.

The country of Ireland — despite, for the most part, speaking English as a first language — has its own language, called ‘Irish’ in English and, in Irish, “Gaeilge”. Irish is a Goidelic or Gaelic language, one of the two groups of insular Celtic languages that originated in Britain and Ireland.

Irish is the “first official language” of Ireland and the “national language” of the Republic of Ireland, according to Article 8 of the Irish Constitution. English is constitutionally recognised only as a “second official language”. Irish was granted the status of an official European language by the European Union in 2005, some 32 years after the country joined the EU.

In Northern Ireland, Irish is recognised as a ‘minority language’, protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which was ratified by the British Government in 2001. The language was first recognised in 1998 under the Good Friday Agreement, and a cross-border body (Foras Na Gaeilge) was set up to promote and protect the language across the country of Ireland as a whole.