Belfast has more Starbucks than Detroit, if it helps anyone fit in.
Don’t do that here either.
How very Irish of you. That is one of the things that strikes me most about Ireland - the Irish, by and large, hate the Irish. Ireland is a lot like America, but the Irish people will never lose what makes them Irish.
:dubious: I’ve never been quoted for something I didn’t post before.
I apologize for the mistake. I had initially quoted both you and ruadh and I messed up the attribution when I deleted your quote.
Is there a country that does not have a contingent of self haters? Swap the Irish and Americans in that quote, and you get the view of America as seen on the interweb, animated TV series and the Daily Show 
If I ever write an autobiography I’m calling it “Diary of a Self Hating Irishman”.
Chiming in late to clarify: from an English speaker’s point of view, the grammar has a lot of weird things (conjugated prepositions, initial verbs, initial mutations, a case system, positive/negative/interrogative/negative-interrogative particles, different “to be” verbs, etc.), but you can come to terms with them and read / speak Irish at a basic level fairly quickly. The idioms, and idiomatic usages of prepositions, continue to master me after many years of study. So I guess I’d say a dedicated learner can quickly attain basic Irish, but Irish fluency is another matter. I recently read a chapter of Mo Scéal Féin with a student and was blown away by the masterful use of the language, something no translation could ever convey.
My own experience as a learner was an anomaly, since I had other Celtic languages, including the medieval ones, first. Welsh has all the same weird features as Irish except the case system, but a more Anglicized vocabulary (relatively) and not quite so many idioms.
And I third the recommendation for Ó Dónaill. The pocket Irish dictionaries like Oxford and Collins are light years better than they were ten years ago, but at home you’ll still want Ó Dónaill. And if you’re really serious, Dinneen and Dwelly (Scottish Gaelic, but if you’re dealing with old-fashioned or dialect texts, still very useful).
Dialann Gael fein-grainiul?
Irish doesn’t have much in the way of noun cases. The main forms are nominative and genitive, singular and plural, which is the same number as English has. (Some nouns have distinct vocative forms too).
The hard part is, for a given noun, figuring out/guessing how to form the plural or the genitive. If there’s a language in the world that has as many ways of changing a singular noun to a plural, I’ve never heard of it.
Don’t forget the fossilized dative, which shows up in the occasional idiom: os cionn etc. But you’re right, it’s not so very different from English in that respect.