Clare has the second-highest proportion of Irish speakers in the country.
A newly-published breakdown of last year’s Census data shows just under 50% of people in this county can speak our native language to some degree.
According to the Central Statistics Office’s ‘Irish Language and Education’ report, there are 54,437 Irish speakers in this county as of last year.
This means there’s been a 3% increase in the number of Irish speakers here since the last Census in 2016.
With 47.1% of the population of Clare having some level of Irish, this county has the second-highest proportion of Irish speakers of any county in the country – second only to Galway County.
At 8,195, rural Ennis is the electoral division with the most Irish speakers in the county while Rathborney in North Clare has the least with just 35.
Nationally, the number of people aged 3 and over who speak Irish has risen by 6% since the last census with 40% of the overall population now being able to speak the language to some extent.
Of these however, 473,000 admit they never speak it in their daily lives.
The number of Irish speakers in the country sits at 1,873,997, with women making up 55% of this number.
