Or at least, that's the number they claim for "fully native speakers", which I'm not sure how they define - for instance, would I count as a "fully native English speaker" when it's not my mother tongue but I speak it at a near-native level?

Perhaps, but if you ask them whether they would prefer to see Irish disappear and have Ireland become a monolingual country, I dare say they'd be rather opposed to that. I too have heard complaints about the mandatory Irish classes, but generally prefaced with some comment about how the speaker does wish to have some fluency in Irish.

And as for "a few thousand", Wikipedia says something like 60-70% of the 90k Gaeltacht inhabitants, plus an undefined number in the rest of the country, use Irish on a daily or near-daily basis. It's a small language, but not THAT small yet - not like Cornish or Manx.

If things were as bad as you make them seem and a large majority of Irish wanted to get rid of those mandatory Irish classes, how exactly do you explain the fact that they're still there? It's a democracy after all. I expect if you let the teenagers who are actually in those classes vote, they might vote to remove them alright, or it might be close at least; but evidently their parents feel that it's a good thing to have their children learn Irish in school still.

I think the matter is more complicated than you make it out to be, and that most Irish would indeed like to speak Irish - but it's a difficult language, they don't necessarily have much opportunity to practice it, and apparently the way the language is taught leaves something to be desired in many schools.

Yes, well, we're not in Antiquity anymore. People live much longer, written records can be made and be kept immeasurably easier, and the people in the West at least have enough leisure time and spare resources that they can devote their time to causes not related to immediate survival, more than previous generations did.

It seems to me your position on natural evolutions in language use is somewhat inconsistent, considering how strongly you felt about maintaining certain grammatical elements in various European languages, when the current trend is to let those fade out of existence.

I can't agree that it's in such a bad state as that.

Yes, well, the United States has no official languages besides English (and even that is, as I recall, not technically an "official" language). If the increase in Hispanic Americans continues, there will come a point where Spanish will become the second language for almost everyone, and those wanting to learn French or some other language can do it as third language instead. In any country that has multiple languages, it's only natural for the government to encourage the learning of the other languages at a higher priority than it would have from an international "how important is this language globally" perspective. And frankly, even from a utility point of view, it's not immediately clear to me that (Anglophone) Irish people have any real need to speak French, Spanish or German, since their native language is already the most spoken foreign language in very nearly every European country. So it's not as if the mandatory Irish is getting in the way of any other important language.

(For a contrasting example, look at Wallonia: there they have a real and quite understandable dilemma between giving priority to the language spoken by a majority of the country and all of a neighbouring country, Dutch, or to the internationally useful language, English. Some schools start with one, others with the other, still others let students choose for themselves. In Flanders, one might suppose there to be a similar problem, but since learning proper English really, really is not a problem for most Flemings even with limited exposure in schools, the decision to give the priority to French is the right one.)

I rather doubt it in the case of Latin. With living languages, certainly the numbers of students learning Irish would take a rapid drop, but I'm fairly confident that "almost non-existent" is a serious exaggeration. Like I said, it's not as if the Anglophone Irish really have any pressing need for any particular language.