Irish interpreters

There’s an article in The Times this morning about the difficulties of finding Irish interpreters for the European Parliament. As it says in the article:

Despite the Irish campaign for language recognition, there is not a single specialised conference-level interpreter’s course in the Republic. […] The problem is that, in most EU countries, most people speak their own language. Irish is one of the official languages of the Irish Republic but maybe only 1 or 2 per cent of the population truly speak it on an everyday basis.