I just revisited the 06 census but can't find the section where it breaks down each town/region in the country in terms of Irish language usage. I know it's out there somewhere because I read it a few months ago.

I wanted to check the returns for certain communities in the fíor-gaeltacht.

I'm not referring to counties or towns over 1,500 people, btw, but specific villages like Gaoth Dobhair, Baile na nGall etc.

Help?

Is this it?

http://beyond2020.cso.ie/censusasp/saps/Pages/Select_Theme_Gaeltacht_Live.asp

Cheers for the link.
Here's the one I was looking for.
http://beyond2020.cso.ie/censusasp/saps/Pages/Select_Theme_Table6_Live.asp
2006 - Electoral Division, Province and County. Now I can look up the frequency of Irish speakers for every single Electoral District in the country!

I wanted to compare those numbers with the 2002 census, which made up a bulk of the data for the recent Sociolinguistic Study on the use of Irish in the Gaeltacht. Of course, they could only rely on the figures for daily speakers, with no mention of frequency of usage. The Electoral District numbers remain the same so it would be easy to compare.
http://www.pobail.ie/en/AnGhaeltacht/LinguisticStudyoftheGaeltacht/

If one wants to avoid wading through all sorts of data...they can look up a specific Electoral Division/Townland and find all relevant census date here:
http://beyond2020.cso.ie/censusasp/saps/Pages/Saps_Search_Start_Live.asp

For anyone who's interested, the link Aonghus provided includes data for Irish speakers aged 3 or over by frequency of speaking Irish.
http://beyond2020.cso.ie/Census/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=12707

http://www.cso.ie/census/census2006results/volume_9/tables_37-51.pdf

(Message edited by Danny2007 on January 30, 2008)

It's fun playing around with the data.

2006
Gaeltacht Population: 95,503 (84,000 of these had the same address 1 year before census night. Approx 78,000 were born in Ireland. Almost 10,000 born in Britain.)

Irish speakers in Gaeltacht: 64,265
(67.3% of total population)

Break it down.
Of these, 13,982 said they speak Irish in the education system ONLY. That's 21.8% of Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht.

Those who speak it daily outside the education system (incl. those who speak it outside and within the ed. system too):
22,866 (17,687 outside only + 5,179 inside & outside)

22,866 of 95,503 = 23.9%

If we take these self-reported figures in good faith, just under a quarter of Gaeltacht residents use Irish daily outside the education system. In other words, as part of their day-to-day lives.

That's sad.

The extremely frightening statistic is that in the language survey (separate to the census), only 24 % of young people in the Gaeltacht (native or fluent speakers) said they spoke Irish to their peers.

If it is not the language of courtship, it will not be the language of the hearth, the language spoken to the next generation.

That is where the crisis is, and we have a very short time to do something about it.

Indeed.

And what was this about there only being approx. 1000 couples raising their kids through Irish in the whole country!?

That can't be right. Hope my memory has failed me. I remember reading a snippet about it on politics.ie

It might be true if it is the number of families where *both* parents speak Irish.

I'm coming up with 3197 households of 3+ people where every person in the household is a daily-outside-the-education-system Irish speaker.

And if you also count households of 3+ people where every person but one is a d.o.t.e.s. Irish speaker (which probably means that the kids are being raised at least bilingually) then the total more than doubles, to 6647 households.

Still scary numbers, but not as bad as only 1000.

Ba chóir an bhéim a chur anois ar Ghaeltachtaí nua. Ní hé sin le rá go bhfuil an troid caillte againne ach a mhalairt. Ach má táimid ag súil leis an dteanga a bheith bheo na céadta bliain amach romhainn caithfidh Gaeltachtaí nua a chur ar bun. Go n-éirí le Baile Gaelach!