It is believed that Irish remained the majority tongue as late as 1800 but became a minority language during the 19th century. It is an important part of
Irish nationalist identity, marking a cultural distance between Irish people and the English. A combination of the introduction of state funded, though predominantly denominationally Church delivered, primary education (the
National Schools), from 1831, in which Irish was omitted from the curriculum till 1878, and only then added as a curiosity, to be learnt after English, Latin, Greek and French, and in the absence of an authorised Irish Catholic bible () before 1981, resulting in instruction primarily in English, or Latin. The
National Schools run by the
Catholic Church discouraged its use until about 1890. The
Great Famine () hit a disproportionately high number of Irish speakers (who lived in the poorer areas heavily hit by famine deaths and emigration), translated into its rapid decline. Economic opportunities for most Irish people arose with the
Second Industrial Revolution in the English-speaking
British Empire and
United States. Contemporary reports spoke of Irish-speaking parents actively discouraging their children from speaking the language, and encouraging the use of English instead. This stigma towards speaking Irish remained strong long after independence. This meant that Irish, rather than being marginalised, was an essential element in the modernization of Ireland, especially before the Great Famine of the 1840s. Irish speakers insisted on using the language in the law courts (even when they knew English), and it was common to employ interpreters. It was not unusual for magistrates, lawyers and jurors to employ their own knowledge of Irish. Fluency in Irish was often necessary in commercial matters. Political candidates and political leaders found the language invaluable. Irish was an integral part of the "devotional revolution" which marked the standardisation of Catholic religious practice, and the Catholic bishops (often partly blamed for the decline of the language) went to great lengths to ensure there was an adequate supply of Irish-speaking priests. Irish was widely and unofficially used as a language of instruction both in the local pay-schools (often called hedge schools) and in the National Schools. Even after the 1840s, Irish speakers could be found in all occupations and professions. The initial moves to reverse the decline of the language were championed by
Anglo-Irish Protestants such as the linguist and clergyman
William Neilson, towards the end of the 18th century, and
Samuel Ferguson; the major push occurred with the foundation by
Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, of the
Gaelic League () in 1893, which was a factor in launching the
Irish Revival movement. The Gaelic league managed to reach 50,000 members by 1904 and also successfully pressured the government into allowing the Irish language as a language of instruction the same year. Leading supporters of Conradh included
Pádraig Pearse and
Éamon de Valera. The revival of interest in the language coincided with other cultural revivals, such as the foundation of the
Gaelic Athletic Association and the growth in the performance of plays about Ireland in English, by playwrights including
W. B. Yeats,
J. M. Synge,
Seán O'Casey and
Lady Gregory, with their launch of the
Abbey Theatre. By 1901, only approximately 641,000 people spoke Irish with only just 20,953 of those speakers being monolingual Irish speakers; how many had emigrated is unknown, but it is probably safe to say that a larger number of speakers lived elsewhere This change in demographics can be attributed to the Great Famine as well as the increasing social pressure to speak English. Even though the Abbey Theatre playwrights wrote in English (and indeed some disliked Irish) the Irish language affected them, as it did all Irish English speakers. The version of English spoken in Ireland, known as
Hiberno-English bears similarities in some grammatical idioms with Irish. Writers who have used Hiberno-English include J. M. Synge, Yeats,
George Bernard Shaw,
Oscar Wilde and more recently in the writings of
Seamus Heaney,
Paul Durcan, and
Dermot Bolger. This national cultural revival of the late 19th century and early 20th century matched the growing Irish radicalism in Irish politics. Many of those, such as Pearse, de Valera,
W. T. Cosgrave () and
Ernest Blythe (), who fought to achieve Irish independence and came to govern the independent Irish Free State, first became politically aware through Conradh na Gaeilge. Douglas Hyde had mentioned the necessity of "de-anglicizing" Ireland, as a
cultural goal that was not overtly political. A Church of Ireland campaign to promote worship and religion in Irish was started in 1914 with the founding of
Cumann Gaelach na hEaglaise (the Irish Guild of the Church). The Catholic Church also replaced its liturgies in Latin with Irish and English following the
Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and its first Bible was published in 1981. The hit song "
Theme from ''Harry's Game''" by
County Donegal music group
Clannad, became the first song to appear on Britain's
Top of the Pops with Irish lyrics in 1982. It has been estimated that there were around 800,000
monoglot Irish speakers in 1800, which dropped to 320,000 by the end of
the famine, and under 17,000 by 1911. == Twenty-first century ==