Everyone that I have met from Ireland, without exception, loathes the enforced Irish language classes. Most people in Ireland do not speak Irish in their daily lives and seem quite happy to have things remain that way. There are perhaps a few thousand people left who speak it as their primary or "mother" tongue, and most of those people are old.

It is a very simple truth that languages survive because people choose to continue speaking them. No amount of forced learning can keep a language alive if no one wants to use it. In fact, the more something is forced on people, the more likely they are to reject it.

Look at antiquity. The peoples of Gaul and the Iberian peninsula decided that their local languages weren't really useful, and Latin displaced it. By contrast, the Dardanians, wedged between Italy and Greece, never stopped using their language, which we know as Albanian. The peoples of Syria and Judea spoke Aramaic, and even though Greek arrived, with all of its culture, learning and beauty, it made a hasty exit along with the Byzantine troops when the Arabs invaded, and Aramaic remained for another 400 years. However, for a host of reasons, Aramaic lost out to Arabic after having resisted Greek.

Irish is dying, and quickly. People do not want to speak it, it has no utility and the conscious choice is to not use it. The same could happen to any other language on earth if the people who speak it decide they don't want to anymore. Let it go.

To your other, tangential point: children in schools should be required to learn A foreign language, but the choice of the language should be up to the students. In the United States, there are almost always two options: French and Spanish. Some schools offer German or Latin as well, and trendy schools will offer other languages (like Chinese these days) based on the languages that people want their children to know.

I would be interested to see what would happen if Ireland decided to replace mandatory Irish with a language requirement that could be satisfied by Irish or Latin. My suspicion is that more students would take Latin than Irish, even though it's been "dead" for quite some time. Add living languages and I think the Irish language programs would be almost non-existent.