-You can take your theory test when you're 17 to get your learner's permit and then you have to wait 6 months to do your practical test. Also our practical driving tests are always on the actual roads and never in a driving course in a school!

-From just looking at some Scottish Gaelic there, it seems they're pretty similar. Some of the words are almost the same but have a few letters different and are pronounced differently. Some are the exact same. Some I don't understand but I probably wouldn't understand them in Irish either! The structure seems to be the same too. There's also Manx Gaelic which I'm not even gonna look at =P

-Irish is a compulsory subject on Primary and Secondary schools at all years unless you're really really really bad at it, or you havn't been living in Ireland for very long and are at a disadvantage because you havn't been learning it.

I'd say 90% of students don't enjoy learning it. This is mostly because it is woefully taught. In my 14 years learning it I only ever had one good Irish teacher and that was in the last two months of my final year. I learned German for 6 years and I can speak it better than I can speak Irish.

There are some schools that teach all subjects through Irish (except English) and students are expected to speak Irish all the time. THEY speak it quite well, as you might imagine! Also there's an area in the west of Ireland called the Gaeltacht where everyone's first language is Irish.

Although it's a pretty cool sounding language, it is dying out, because it's kinda useless, difficult to learn and badly taught. As well as that people don't like being forced to learn a language that they'll never use (unless they want to be a lawyer or a police officer), so they end up kind of resenting it and pushing it away. I think if there was an option of learning it in schools and if it was taught properly people would be more enthusiastic about it.