Sorry if this is obvious, but is English widely spoken at the smaller Irish (ROI) aerodromes?
If not, is there a basic phraseology guide somewhere to help me understand what’s going on in the circuit?
I don’t understand the question.
Are you asking whether Gaelic is spoken (no) or whether there is likely to be anyone manning the radio (depends, but very often yes).
In France there are aerodromes marked FR-only. Pilots speak French there and if there’s someone manning the radio, they will be speaking French also.
I had wondered if some smaller aerodromes in ROI would be Irish/Gaelic only or primarily. If so, then a phraseology guide would then be helpful.
But if English is widely spoken and understood everywhere then I won’t need such a guide.
Irish (Gaelige) is understood by maybe a quarter of people in the Republic of Ireland, spoken regularly by maybe 10%, and genuine first language for around 2%.
While it enjoys equal status with English as one of the official languages of the country, English is the universal day-to-day language.
A map of where Irish is spoken on a day-to-day basis (but even if there is an airport, they will use English)
Okay thanks. I had not realised the use of English was so widespread there!
Ireland uses English for aviation.
@dublinpilot and I flew around it in 2014 – report here. It doesn’t surprise me the Aran Islands (in Cobalt’s map above) still speak Gaelic 
There is a mention there of another “protected community” which speaks it and they got their own airport… with the runway numbers painted backwards
James_Chan wrote:
Okay thanks. I had not realised the use of English was so widespread there!
Maybe more than they actually wanted
Cobalt wrote:
Irish (Gaelige) is understood by maybe a quarter of people in the Republic of Ireland, spoken regularly by maybe 10%, and genuine first language for around 2%.
Pretty amazing as its given equal billing as Maths and English in the education system to the age of 18!
zuutroy wrote:
Pretty amazing as its given equal billing as Maths and English in the education system to the age of 18!
I don’t know about this particular case, but an analogy could be Swedish in Finland. Swedish is an official language of Finland, but the first language only of a small and decreasing part of the population. Swedish is compulsory in Finnish-speaking schools but still many Finnish-speaking Finns do not speak it or are uncomfortable enough that they don’t want to. The reason being that it is seen as pointless and there is a lot of resistance to the idea that Swedish should be compulsory in schools.
(The analogy is not complete as in Finland there are also nationalist reasons for not wanting the Swedish language.)
In the Irish / Welsh context, practically the whole issue is nationalist, which is why – apart from local govt imposed political correctness – few care about it
