AH Challenge: Better situation for Irish Gaelic

Well, I was listening to some Gaelic music on youtube just now, and thinking about the language's situation (extinct as a native language in the bulk of Ireland, with native speakers a few percentage points of the population and falling), so the thought occured to me-what POD would be necessary to get Irish Gaelic in the same situation as Welsh? That is, spoken natively by around 25% of the country (with that number remaining fairly stable), having a widespread prescence in all parts of Ireland, and generally not in immediate danger of dying off within the next 50 years or so.

(Irish Gaelic as a majority language would be interesting, but I'm assuming a POD after 1800 or so, so I think that would be very hard to have work realistically).
 

archaeogeek

Banned
A POD after 1800 can still yield a gaelic majority, given at the time of the famines it was still a solid majority. Wolfe Tone's rebellion might also provide an interesting POD; at the time the protestant/catholic divide hadn't ben exploited to the same extent as it would be later, and a lot of the anglo-irish and protestant irish did consider themselves Irish (Wellington was something of an exception in the matter, a lot of anglo-irish litterature indicates that they did feel they were a different "people" than the english in many ways, even those who weren't mistakenly called anglo-irish merely out of religious affiliation, a 19th century phenomenon as far as I can tell but I'll be happy to be proven wrong, with sources, not merely imperial boosterism, just in case I'm getting some of that to deal with again :p )

Also, while the Gaeltacht's population has been falling, the overall first/primary language gaelic population has been growing back and is now about 10% of the two irelands.

Ultimately, about the only way to avoid the famine, solidly, is either land reform or a different mentality in London (well land reform also requires a different mentality in London anyway), one that doesn't see temporarily relief aid as subjugated races leeching on the empire's lifeblood (also happened with the famines of India)
 
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