Irish is a Celtic language and, as such, is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Irish has evolved from a form of Celtic which was introduced into Ireland at some period during the great Celtic migrations of antiquity between the end of the second millennium and the fourth century BC. Irish is the earliest of European vernaculars north of the Alps in which extensive writings exist.

The Penal Laws, instituted by the British government during the later sixteenth century and of the seventeenth century, set out to undermine the status of Irish and had the cumulative effect of eliminating the Irish-speaking ruling classes and of destroying their cultural institutions. These were replaced by a new ruling class whose language was English, and thereafter English was the primary language of government and public institutions.

Yet because of the rapid growth of the rural population, the actual number of Irish speakers increased substantially during the first decades of the nineteenth century. This number consisted almost entirely of an impoverished rural population which was decimated by the Great Famine and by resultant mass emigration. More than 1 million Irish people died of starvation or disease during the famine. A further 1.5 million emigrated (mainly to the USA) in the immediate aftermath of the famine. The emigration continued for the next 150 years. By 1891, the number of Irish speakers in Ireland had been reduced to 680,000. (It is important to note that the forebears of most of those 40+ Million Irish people living in the US are descended from Irish speakers who were forced to leave Ireland in the 18th century.)

Following the Irish war of Independence and the subsequent release of Ireland from British rule in 1921, Irish was declared the official language of Ireland. Unfortunately, much damage had been done and Irish remained as a community language only in small regions called the Gaeltacht. The Gaeltachts were located in isolated pockets mostly in the far west of Ireland. On the whole, the land in the Gaeltachts was poor and income levels were low. In the 1991 census, the population of the officially-defined Gaeltachts was 79,563. However, a 1999 survey of the Gaeltachts found that fewer than 37,000 people spoke Irish on a daily basis. The fact is, that while the population of the Gaeltachts is going up, most of those moving into the Gaeltacht have little or no interest in the language. At the same time, well-meaning efforts to increase employment in the Gaeltacht have only succeeded in bringing in jobs that encourage the native speakers of Irish to speak English.