So good to hear all that, Roibeard Óg!
Roibeard Óg wrote:On the note of ancient texts, Gaelic is the oldest European literary language, and the traditional music archive and INL have thousand upon thousands of famous Irish texts stored. Much of the common Roman Catholic mass texts come from Ireland, the country which altered and worked on it most.
I must have read it somewhere that it was Irish monks who saved the cultural heritage of the Western Europe when times got unstable in the Middle Ages, but I wasn't sure whether they had been writing in Gaelic or in Latin.
Here, in Poland, there is one city where you can actually do Celtic Studies at university. They even published a coursebook in Polish for Polish students learning Irish Gaelic and some other books on Irish phonology, syntax, etc.
As for the response to Irish Gaelic among Irish people I've come across two completely different attitudes. One was that since it's compulsory at school, no one really wants to learn it, let alone use it outside school.
The other was from one of my university teachers. One day I found an Irish Gaelic coursebook in the library and when I showed it to a friend of mine who had just come back from holidays in Ireland we decided that we would show it to that teacher, an Irishman, and ask whether we could find someone to teach us Gaelic. It was completely crazy, since we didn't even have any classes with that teacher at the time, so we didn't know one another. But when we came to him during his duty hours, he simply opened the book and started reading aloud!

He claimed that Irish pronunciation is much more regular and thus easier than the English one, though I still cannot agree with that

For the time being, I'm trying to learn some phrases from Giota Beag at BBC Northern Ireland. I know it really is very little, but I hope in time I'll be able to learn more of that beautiful language...
Btw, have you heard of this 'experiment'?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/nort ... 254947.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1983434,00.html
those articles aren't very optimistic
And one more thing, I was so happy when I heard the President of Ireland speaking Gaelic at the beginning of the UE enlargement ceremony in Dublin on 1 May 2004!
