[julesnp]

Having learned some Irish Gaelic in the past, I'd say it actually has much better correlation between spelling and pronunciation than English, it's just that it uses very different rules, which can cause confusion when the words are brought into other languages.

'S' for example is always pronounced like the English 'sh' if it's next to 'e' or 'i', and like a regular English 's' if it's next to 'a', 'o' or 'u'.