Of course it's all a matter of apples and oranges because each language has its difficulties in different points, and different people will find different aspects the hardest in a language. We had that discussion a while back with your points-based system, but the problem is everybody really has their own way of weighing the various aspects.

Still, it seems to me that while Spanish, French and as far as I'm aware Italian have a good amount of similarities in grammar and vocabulary that are hence likely about equally difficult, the French spelling is notoriously tricky - even native speakers make rather basic errors these days. I'll grant you, though, that I'm only talking about more-or-less standard Spanish here; there are more variants and dialects of Spanish than of French, some of them rather hard to follow. In French, unless your interlocutor is Haitian, African from some countries or from the more remote parts of Quebec, mutual understanding should be less of a problem.

In any case, even if we suppose you're right, French being the easiest language to learn doesn't mean that it's easy. Learning a foreign language from scratch to the point where you can read novels in it is a long and arduous process for most people, and all the more so for those who haven't done it with other languages already in the past.

As for Irish, we'll agree to disagree.