The decline of Irish as a community language in the Gaeltacht is in contrast with its rise as an L2 in the rest of the country. This research explores the tension between community-oriented language policy, focused on the preservation of native speakers, and ‘new speakerness', centred on the production of committed learners, to establish whether these two approaches should be regarded as independent or as complementary. Data were gathered on the basis of census results and a corpus of scientific texts, and a series of interviews was conducted with three experts. The results, supported by a comparison based on the criteria of ‘capacity', ‘opportunities', and ‘desire', suggest that the future of Irish as a living language relies on the existence of both L1 and L2 speakers. Due to ideological differences, community-oriented language policy and ‘new speakerness' can, however, yield different results and thus favour one particular speaker group. Therefore, they should be combined in a targeted and balanced way.