Hornsby, to my knowledge, does not write about Irish speakers, new or otherwise, and doesn't appear to have "led well funded research training programmes for up and coming early-career researchers, with most of the classes/lectures run by fellow ‘new speakerists’". What are you basing this on? 5/5

Have you contacted the authors to engage in a fruitful dialogue on the different approaches? It would also be very informative to post some examples of L2 speakers claiming to be native speakers - that's not something I've come across myself. /4

Walsh and O'Rourke were pointing out that there are different ways of relating to multilingualism, and that some Irish speakers use the language in new and unexpected ways. Whether we like these new uses of the language or not, I think it is still important to understand them. /3

New speaker studies investigate how L2 learners or native 'returnees' operate as communities in the absence of native speakers, in the big cities or in areas which are no longer part of the heartland of the language. Isn't there room for both sorts of study within sociolinguistics? /2

An interesting discussion. It seems you overstate the case that new speaker studies seek to delegitimise native speaker position, however. As you note, there have been many studies on minority languages which have studied the place of the language in community networks and interactions. /1