The Scottish census included a few questions about Gaelic, so while less than 60,000 respondents said they were fluent Gaelic speakers, some observers are saying that the figure of 95,672 people over the age of 3 who have some knowledge of Gaelic is more important. There are people who understand Gaelic well but don't feel confident of their speaking ability (over 27,000 respondents!), people who are fluent speakers but not literate (included in the figure of 58,652 speakers), people who read Gaelic well but don't speak it fluently, etc. They could be encouraged to build on their skills.

Caoimhin Ó Donghaile has made detailed summaries of the census results for Gaelic available at http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/suil/cunntas-sluaigh-2001/. If you click on the blue links on that page, you will get breakdowns of distribution of Gaelic speakers by age, location and even accommodation type. If you aren't a Gaelic reader but are interested, don't be put off because the links titles such as "Luchd-labhairt a réir aois " (speakers according to age) lead you to pages with information tables in English

Census figures for previous years can be found at http://www.scottishhistory.com/articles/highlands/gaelic/gaelic.htm

General census information for Scotland is at >http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/
or http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/grosweb/grosweb.nsf/pages/censushm
I should find the URL for pages with similar information for Northern Ireland and for the Irish republic, and I see there are others here who might like to study the Welsh census returns.