Irish is now an official language of the European Union, which means that all official documents, laws, regulations etc. have to be written in Irish along with the other 22 official European languages. This is for a a language that is spoken on a daily basis by approximately 300,000 people out of an EU population of 500 million. That works out at .06% of the entire percentage of the EU. Even if you just look at the percentage of the Irish population [PDF] that speaks Irish, it’s still only about 7%. And those figures include kids that have to speak it in school. In reality, only about 70,000 people conduct their daily business through Irish. That’s .01% of the EU population and less than 2% of the Irish population.