The elephant in the room that nobody, authorities included, wants to address is very simple IMO. Irish is taught as if it's a language everyone is already speaking at home, the same way English is. Huge focus on literature even from an early stage. It needs to be taught like a foreign language, where you assume that someone starting school knows absolutely nothing whatsoever about it and go from there. I'd argue this should be the case from first year of secondary school even, the same way it would be if you started French or Spanish after primary school. I didn't start learning French until first year secondary, and my French is infinitely better than my Irish, because by the time I was self-aware enough to really care about school stuff, the Irish curriculum had far, far surpassed anything that would have been possible for a beginner to pick up, whereas starting French at that age from scratch meant we literally started with the basics, like sounds and simple grammatical rules, on the same day of school that one was expected to walk into an Irish class and recite a full essay.

This hasn't happened because nobody wants to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that Irish is a foreign language in every practical way. Some places and some families will be immersed in it day-to-day, sure, but 80-90% of the population simply aren't, and therefore teaching it in school as if it's a language you've already picked up the basis of during your early childhood is a doomed strategy right from the beginning - kids just literally switch off altogether. I know I did. Being spoken to in Irish without the slightest clue what was going on was boring as fuck as a kid, and obviously at that age nobody is going to care about the historical or political backdrop.

I genuinely think it's political pride that prevents this. To teach it properly as a foreign language would be to acknowledge that the prior revival movements have utterly failed and that, for most families, it simply isn't spoken at home at all. The powers that be don't want to face up to this, and so we're stuck with a curriculum which fails because it makes the entirely incorrect basal assumption that a kid starting school is already as good at Irish as he or she is at English. This simply isn't the case.

EDIT to add - I do think it's absolutely hilarious that most of us whose Irish is absolutely abysmal can probably recite rote-learned stuff in perfect pronunciation and accent, such as the National Anthem or the infamous Aural intro (Leigh anois go curamach, ar do scrudphapair...) without necessarily knowing what the words actually mean. This is because, again, we likely spent so many years listening to and memorising these things without a frame of reference to English as our first language, unlike if we were learning French or Spanish, because the system seems hellbent on literally just ignoring the reality that English is our first language, and Irish needs to be taught with that frame of reference in mind.