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Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

Another fun fact, the current population in Ireland is about 5.3 millions. That means there're more Irish in U.S. than in Ireland.

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If you include Northern Ireland, it's 7.2 million. But it was 8.5 million before the famine; 6.5 immediately after. After that emigration drove that number down. The population size never recovered to pre famine levels.

My mistake. I did only look up the population in Ireland, forgot that Northern Ireland was part of Ireland until the 1900's.

Or you could say that Ireland was a part of Northern Ireland ;)

It's also one of the few (only?) countries in the world whose population is smaller today than it was 150 years ago.

Census data I found is that Ireland has about 7.1 people.

But it also says that the year before the shit completely hit the fan, the Ireland population topped out at 8.18m. 10 years later it was down 1.6m, and another .6m after another 10. And it just kept trending downwards until the 1930's, (4.21m) and bottomed out again in ~1960 before it started growing again.

We may catch 'em on a per-capita basis too, if current immigration, emmigration, and tfr trends continue.

What do you mean?

I suspect it means: With mass immigration occurring in Ireland at the rate it is, soon the proportion of ethnic Irish in Ireland's population may match the proportion of ethnic Irish in the US's population.

Hyperbole is a common facet of humour (to make a point) in the British Isles.

All the better for Irish crew diversity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaaZsBxWeiQ

And yet, so few of us Yanks speak it well. Nothing like hearing English spoken in Ireland.

Are you talking about the Irish language? Very few Irish people speak it well. Less than 2% use it daily.

I think GP is saying the Irish speak and write a more beautiful or clever English, the language adopted from their conquerors, than in the USA, or perhaps even England.

Correct, thank you.

I said “Nothing like hearing English spoken in Ireland” and wasn’t talking about Gaelic. The rich way they use English and the accent are spectacular

I misinterpreted "Nothing like hearing English..." as a comment on the fact that the indigenous language is no longer spoken very much. Just a bias of mine.

Btw "Gaelic" alone typically refers to either the language family - Scottish, Irish, and Manx - or specifically to Scottish Gaelic. Irish Gaelic, in English, is simply referred to as "Irish" or "the Irish language". And it's largely the source of the way the Irish use English.

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