The Central Statistics Office (CSO) have published a Census 2016 report which shows that almost 40% of people in Ireland can speak Irish.
Daily Irish speakers in Donegal account for 28.8% of all daily Irish speakers in Gaeltacht areas, with An Bun Beag-Doirí Beaga and Letterkenny being two of the strongest Irish areas nationally.
1.76 million people aged three and over indicated that they have a firm grasp of the Irish language.
In Donegal, 37% of people (56,738) can speak Irish, down from 58,998 Irish speakers in 2011.
Over 75% of people in the following areas speak Irish; Arranmore Island, Gleanncholmcille, Fintown, Cloghan, Dungloe, Letterkenny, Magheraclogher, Annagry, Meenaclady, Dunlewey, Cross Roads, and Roguill.
On the other end of the scale, there were no Irish speakers recorded in Killygordon, Templecarn, and Pettigoe.
Source: CSO
Nationally, more females (968,777) than males (792,643) stated that they could speak Irish, with a slight decline of -0.7% in the language usage being recorded compared to 2011.
Almost one in four of those who said they could speak Irish (23.8%) indicated that they never spoke it. A further 31.7% said that they only speak our national language within the education system.
The number speaking Irish daily stood at 73,803, representing 1.7% of the population. This was a decline of 3,382 (4.4%) on 2011. Most of those whole spoke Irish daily (20.2%) lived in Dublin City and suburbs. Together, Cork, Galway and Limerick accounted for 8.2% of daily Irish speakers.
Outside of these cities, the largest absolute numbers of daily speakers were living in An Bun Beag-Doirí Beaga (771), followed by Letterkenny (525) and Swords (487).
Daily Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht areas of Galway County and Donegal made up almost three-quarters of all daily Irish speakers in Gaeltacht areas, with 9,445 (45.9%) in Galway and 5,929 (28.8%) in Donegal.
To see the percentage of Irish speakers in your Electoral Division, you can follow this link to visit the CSO’s interactive map:
http://census.cso.ie/p10map51/
