text: The initial moves to reverse the decline of the language were championed by Anglo-Irish Protestants, such as the linguist and clergyman William Neilson, towards the end of the 18th century, and Samuel Ferguson; the major push occurred with the foundation by Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, of the Gaelic League (known in Irish as ) in 1893, which was a factor in launching the Irish Revival movement. The Gaelic league managed to reach 50,000 members by 1904 and also successfully pressured the government into allowing the Irish language as a language of instruction the same year. Leading supporters of Conradh included Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera. The revival of interest in the language coincided with other cultural revivals, such as the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association and the growth in the performance of plays about Ireland in English, by playwrights including W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Seán O'Casey and Lady Gregory, with their launch of the Abbey Theatre. By 1901 only approximately 641,000 people spoke Irish with only just 20,953 of those speakers being monolingual Irish speakers; how many had emigrated is unknown, but it is probably safe to say that a larger number of speakers lived elsewhere  This change in demographics can be attributed to the Great Famine as well as the increasing social pressure to speak English.
  Even though the Abbey Theatre playwrights wrote in English (and indeed some disliked Irish) the Irish language affected them, as it did all Irish English speakers. The version of English spoken in Ireland, known as Hiberno-English bears similarities in some grammatical idioms with Irish. Writers who have used Hiberno-English include J.M. Synge, Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and more recently in the writings of Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, and Dermot Bolger.