The Irish Government launched a strategy for the Irish language in 2010 within the worst economic crisis the state had experienced since its foundation in 1922. This represents an attempt to revitalise the language in the context of an historic shift towards English. Historically education played a critical role in Irish government language reversal strategies. The Irish language, as part of nation-building, has been articulated as central to republican citizenship and as a private, nostalgic good. The place of Irish in education has been contested since the foundation of the state. This paper focuses on a struggle over the role of Irish medium education and its relations to belonging and citizenship in the urban town of Dingle within a rural Irish-speaking region in south west Ireland. My analytical framework for exploring the nature of political learning uses four theoretically informed dimensions: Private – Public (C. Wright Mills) Place – Space (David Harvey/Doreen Massey) Social – Political (Chantal Mouffe/Rogers Brubaker) Socialisation – Subjectification (Biesta) The paper explores the complex and contradictory articulations of private sentiment, local rootedness or cosmopolitan identity, and political identification that emerge in the context of struggles over the nature of Irish political and cultural identity.