Maaaaaaaarten wrote:English speakers should be the last ones to complain about a language's spelling though. As I understand it these Celtic languages (which all have remarkable spellings) at least have a logic to it, it's just pronounced very differently from how other languages use the Latin alphabet, which makes some sense because they also have a pretty distinct phonology so when you have to reflect that phonology with the Latin alphabet you're forced to have a rather distinct use of the Latin alphabet..
English spelling is just complete incoherent chaos. (Note how <e> is used six times in the previous sentence and reflects five different vowels and is silent once and furthermore <o> is used three times and reflects three different vowels here. Anglophones, don't complain about other people's writing systems.)
For the most part, English and Irish spelling are equivalent, in that they're both largely etymological and far removed from their almost phonological origins. I wouldn't say one is more chaotic than the other. Irish phonology is and always was pretty different from what the Latin alphabet was created to represent, but the same could be said about English phonology (although to an admittedly lesser extent).
Although I guess Irish benefits from stemming from a single spelling tradition (the Irish one), whereas English is made more complicated by the mixture of the native and Norman spelling traditions. In that sense, you could compare Irish to French (both have seemingly incomprehensible, but actually fairly systematic spellings) and say that English is indeed more chaotic than both.
Regardless, that chaos usually only exists for people who don't know the language. Once you do, those apparent inconsistencies generally make a lot of sense and they come in very handy.