The story didn’t go that way. I wrote to you earlier, Father, about the plunder of Ireland. How the English have robbed Ireland not just of its wealth, and of many of its lives, but of its sense of self. After the famine, the Irish mind awakened to the possibility of losing even the memory of itself. And it responded with a self-conscious attempt at cultural revival.

Read: What’s lost when a language dies

What most people say is that the Gaelic cultural revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries produced a lot of good and some great literature in English—Yeats, Joyce, and so on. And the revival of Irish sport under the Gaelic Athletic Association was a crushing success. I know because I can listen live to the broadcast of Mayo and Dublin fighting to a draw in Gaelic football on my smartphone. But we are supposed to conclude that the language revival was doomed, and possibly destructive to have tried. In his book about the history of the Irish language, Aidan Doyle concludes, “Anybody who sets himself an impossible task is bound to fail. My contention … is that by the time the Gaelic League was founded, it was too late to reverse the language shift. If this is correct there was never a real possibility of Irish becoming a majority language in Ireland again.”

So should we all have a laugh at Pearse? Currently there are more than 400 million native English speakers in the world. Some estimates say that nearly one in five people on the planet is studying or speaking English as a second language. In many places, studying English is compulsory. The numbers for Irish are not so encouraging. I remember the day I began contemplating the current estimated number of native Irish speakers: 35,000.

A little while after I made my vow to learn Irish, my father-in-law took me to Colorado for an event commemorating the World War II company his father was in, the one that cut up through Europe from Anzio and eventually liberated Dachau. At the hotel in the morning, instead of doing a little lesson of Irish on a website I was subscribed to, I was reading The Irish Times, with the latest report on how the Gaeltacht, the various regions of Ireland where Irish is still spoken daily, was dying. By 2025, Irish will cease to be a majority language in the Gaeltacht, it said. The latest studies showed that once the percentage of Irish speakers in these areas fell below 67 percent, Irish would become a language of the old; the young would fail to develop freedom of expression in Irish and would instead form their identity and self-conception as English speakers. This is a disaster for the language for obvious reasons. The Gaeltacht is where almost all serious students of the Irish language finally finish acquiring it. The few tens of thousands of native Irish speakers today already struggle to support the compulsory learning of the hundreds of thousands of students of the language in Irish schools. And most of these students will fail to acquire it anyway. Beyond that, the Gaeltacht still has some pull as a physical and spiritual heartland of the nation, the repository of true Irishness.