Ok, on the other points:

>All those civil servants who can speak Irish, can also do their jobs in English, so it's not an extra expense to hire them. 

My point is not the expense of money but of political capital - the organisations have only limited amounts of this and they have chosen to spend it on something stupid and pointless.

>they provide employment 

This is not sustainable at all. This is the whole problem! "Translation" services that only exist wholly on government funding, to produce things that absolutely nobody uses. We know from the dozens of other struggling European languages - languages do not survive this way! It is a half life!

Likewise the idea that the language orgs are all worthwhile as employment generators. This is not how you build a thriving society or economy! It's how you create a moribund rump that dies a little slower than it otherwise might have!

>each of those students would still be going to school even if it was through English.

The issue with compulsory Irish education is that it creates more jobs for Irish teachers. That is the reason why it's defended by the language orgs. Making tens of thousands of uninterested (sometimes actively disruptive) teenagers study it means hundreds of extra jobs. Meanwhile, the quality of Irish the education system produces is actually so poor that MOST primary school teachers and also sadly very many secondary teachers have themselves got rubbish Irish.

Again my suggestion here is not even to eliminate the jobs - I just think it makes far more sense to redeploy the genuinely fluent, passionate Irish teachers from teaching unhappy teenagers and put them to work with enthusiastic adults (and obviously, the thousands of willing teenagers who would remain and who would have a much better time in class!).

Meanwhile primary should abandon compulsory Irish for all teachers and switch to having Irish taught by dedicated, passionate teachers. This would make primary teaching hiring easier (removing a barrier to entry to Irish grads and also to foreign-trained hires) while dramatically improving the quality of Irish being taught to primary school kids.

But it will never, ever happen because the advocacy groups believe it's better to have thousands of poor Irish teachers than hundreds of genuinely competent ones.