At first I was wondering why a Chinese translation had been omitted, but then I realized the service was blocked by the Great Firewall.
EDIT: "secure" talks about this further down the page. He says it's still taught in sort of a token way in the schools, but that he didn't run into any Gaelic in his dealings with the government.
We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university.
Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you see it at the top-level, like in parliament, its almost always done for effect.
My grandaunt is a famous Irish poet - her work is part of the curriculum. When she tutored me she focussed on reading from newspapers and speaking out loud, because going straight to literature makes no sense.
I learned Japanese as a foreign language in college, and very little time in class was spent on grammar, and not much time was spent on reading/writing. We spent the vast majority of our time on the spoken language, which we learned in the context of simulated real-world conversations. The result was that while we were weak in the written language, our pronunciation and grammar was top-notch.
We had no trouble subsequently teaching ourselves the written language (though children might not have the initiative to do that). But if we had not properly learned the spoken language in class and the grammar outside of class at the same time, we might not have had the foundation necessary to progress with the written language. It's much more difficult to teach yourself the spoken language than reading/writing/grammar.
The number of Polish speakers just about beats Irish with almost 120,000.