https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/08/100-best-novel...

In terms of the cultural resurgeance of Irish, whilst the Rubberbandits have done their part, its nothing compared to the full-on assault on cultural consciousness the politically divisive rap-group 'Kneecap' have performed - although they're about to be cancelled by the pro-Zionist lobby in the US.

https://www.screenireland.ie/news/kneecap-becomes-first-iris...

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kneecap

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFYfp-hKxZQ

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/23/sharon-osbourn...

FWiW he was a prolific writer all his life, as a pre computer civil servent he would have written at length all through many of his days at work .. the rules of the day demanded he be circumspect in regard to public opinion:

  Given the desperate poverty of Ireland in the 1930s to 1960s, a job as a civil servant was considered prestigious, being both secure and pensionable with a reliable cash income in a largely agrarian economy.

  The Irish civil service has been, since the Irish Civil War, fairly strictly apolitical.
  Civil Service Regulations and the service's internal culture generally prohibit Civil Servants above the level of Clerical Officer from publicly expressing political views.

  As a practical matter, this meant that writing in newspapers on current events was, during O'Brien's career, generally prohibited without departmental permission which would be granted on an article-by-article, publication-by-publication basis.

  This fact alone contributed to O'Brien's use of pseudonyms, though he had started to create character authors even in his pre-civil service writings.

He had an extended family to support after all.

The real division is between Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) and Brythonic (Welsh, British and Cornish)

There's only 3 regional dialects of Irish - Connacht, Munster and Ulster - and all three dialects are tested at Aural level in the School leavers Exam. There's very little difference between them bar pronunciation and some common phrases.

The vast vast majority of daily Irish speakers would speak Connacht Irish - i.e. Connemara Irish - due to spending time in the Colaiste Gaeilge during the summer holidays; effectively state-subsidised Irish language Summer Camps. It's also the predominant dialect on TG4 - the Irish language TV station.

Wales has a massively larger proportion of native speakers of Welsh daily, but this is due to the lack of colonial history attempting to wipe out the language, and the far more multi-cultural make-up of Ireland.

- Israel is composed of people from different parts of the world with different languages so as a matter of practical policy they had to standardize on some uniform language for the country. Scotland doesn't have this problem: English is already the uniform standardized language.

- Israel exists in a more "existential" position than Scotland - there is more of a sense that their country and culture could be lost. Thus there is a bigger motivation to preserve what makes them different. I think you see this play out in Ireland, actually: there seems to be more of an interest in the Irish language in Northern Ireland, where the Irish identify is seen as more under threat, than in the Republic, where it is safe.

This is definitely one of these cases where you feel that things that were around in your childhood have been around forever, but things introduced since then are new.

I'd assumed TG4 also dated from the 60s/70s like RTE and was going to comment that the time frames didn't really line up. Turns out it came about in 1996 - still over a decade before the current revival in interest, but much closer in overlap.