Irish has an official status, a state that funds it, a place on every school timetable in the Republic, its own broadcasters and its own publishing. On paper it has every advantage a language could want. And it is still not the language most Irish people live their lives in. That is not a failure of anybody's effort. It is a lesson about what actually keeps a language alive, and it is the exact reverse of the Hebrew story.
Every language on this site was run through the same test: six Danish sentences chosen because a word for word engine breaks on them. Then somebody read the output. Irish did not pass.
Most of the Irish lines looked reasonable. One did not. The sentence about circumcision came back using a word that is not the standard Irish term, and that looks as though it was assembled out of Irish parts rather than recalled from Irish Scripture. A fluent reader spots that in about a second.
It is also not a stylistic slip. Circumcision in Romans is a doctrinal word carrying a specific argument, and inventing a plausible looking substitute for it is exactly the class of mistake that does damage in a church.
So we are not printing our Irish here. Every other language page on this site shows real unedited output because it earned the right to. This one does not, and pretending otherwise would only mean an Irish speaker discovers it later, which is worse.
We would rather tell you than demonstrate. An honest sentence about where we are is worth more than a sample chosen to flatter us, and it is the only version a fluent speaker will not catch immediately.
This is not an excuse. It is the reason the specific failure above is the kind of failure Irish produces.
In most European languages, endings change. In Irish the start of the word changes too, depending on what came before it. The same noun can appear with several different opening sounds and spellings in the space of a paragraph, all of them correct. Anything that matches words by their first letters is in trouble immediately.
Irish sentences typically begin with the verb, then the doer, then the rest. That is a different shape from Danish, English, German or any of the languages a general purpose engine has seen most of. A translation that keeps the source order and swaps the words produces something that is not Irish at all.
The blunt version: there is far less written Irish in the world than there is written German or Spanish, and less again of it is religious. So a system has fewer examples of how a church actually speaks, and when it lacks a word it is more likely to build one that looks right than to recall the one that is right.
Hebrew went centuries without being anybody's everyday language, had no state, no school system and no official status, and then became the language children argued in within a few generations.
Irish had the opposite of all that. It was never lost. It has always had native speakers, in districts where it is the language of the shop and the kitchen. It gained official status, a place in every school, its own media and public money. And it has kept shrinking as a household language anyway.
Set the two side by side and something uncomfortable becomes clear. A language does not live in a curriculum or a statute. It lives in households, in the language people argue and pray and gossip in when nobody is assessing them. Policy can protect a language. It has never yet been shown to be able to make one the language of a home.
None of which is a reason to give up on Irish, and Irish speakers are not asking anybody's opinion on it. It is a reason to take seriously the people who do use it, because they are carrying something that no institution can carry for them.
The mechanics work. It is the quality of what comes out that we have just told you about, and both things are true at once.
Spoken from the stage. An Irish speaker can preach and the rest of the room follows in its own languages. One of the 81 languages that can be the source.
Read as captions. On a phone, or on the wall through MulingDisplay. One of 182 that can be read.
Heard as a voice. One of 81 that can be listened to rather than read.
Irish sits in the list as ga, its own name Gaeilge. It is available and you can turn it on. We are telling you where it is weak so that you can decide with your eyes open. See all 183 languages.
This is the part that makes the failure above frustrating rather than merely unfortunate. Irish is not short of Scripture. The words are there. They simply were not reached for.
The New Testament was put into Irish by William Ó Domhnaill, and the Old Testament translation was carried through under William Bedell, a bishop who insisted that people should have Scripture in the language they actually spoke. That was a controversial position at the time and it is the same position every vernacular translation in Europe was fought over.
Later came a complete modern Irish Bible, and with it a settled contemporary vocabulary for the things a sermon talks about every week.
So there is an established Irish word for circumcision, and there is an established Irish word for grace, and for the flesh, and for the Spirit. A translation that builds a new one instead is not filling a gap. It is failing to look.
Four things, and the first one is the one people get wrong most often.
Irish communities abroad are old and large, particularly in Britain, and the overwhelming majority of them live and worship in English.
Inside that there are people who learned Irish at home, people who learned it at school and kept it, and people who took it up as adults and use it deliberately. There are Irish language groups and gatherings in cities far from Ireland, kept going by exactly the sort of person who volunteers for everything in your church.
Which means the realistic case here is not an Irish speaking congregation. It is one or two people for whom this language is a serious part of who they are, sitting in a room where nobody has ever offered it.
Those are the people worth being honest with, and they are the ones who will tell you exactly where our Irish is falling down.
No dates, because a date we cannot keep is another thing to apologise for later.
The same six test sentences, read by somebody who actually uses Irish, with the church vocabulary checked line by line. That is what stands between this page and a benchmark section like every other language has.
Not general fluency. The specific vocabulary a service depends on: grace, the flesh, the Spirit, salvation, covenant, circumcision. Those are the words where a wrong choice changes meaning rather than tone.
If it passes, the output goes on this page unedited like everywhere else. If it does not, this section stays as it is. We are not going to quietly delete the admission and hope nobody remembers.
If you use Irish and you are willing to mark our work, tell us. A fluent reader with an hour is worth more to this than anything we can do on our own.
You can. It is in the list and it runs like any other language. What we are asking is that you go in knowing the quality is not where it should be, that you tell your Irish speaker the same thing, and that you treat the first service as a test rather than a solution.
Because a language quietly missing from a list is not honesty, it is a different way of saying nothing. Irish is in the system, it works mechanically, and some of it is fine. Publishing what we know is a better deal for an Irish speaker than making the decision for them.
Almost always, yes, and that is precisely why nobody ever offers them anything else. Whether that matters is theirs to say, not ours and not yours. Ask them, in private, and take whatever answer you get without persuading.
It is a separate language, not a variety of Irish, and it is not one we can offer as a voice or as captions today. We would rather print that than let somebody find out on a Sunday.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earphone.