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…