Galway isn't much better either, even in 2016. I was looking for long-term accommodation there for a masters program at NUIG and pretty much everything was taken up by short-term for the summer. I could hop around place to place until October, when they basically agreed to some winter long-term. It was awful.
This is exactly why I would learn it. It's exactly how I've learned (in depth) ALL of the 10-15 various languages I know. Start with something that's familiar and work backwards.
I hate the bullshit elitist crap like "oh don't learn that, you can't code in Go until you've learned x,y,z". Everybody learns differently. I learned jQuery before learning JavaScript.
I wish the people on this thread would stop assuming everyone is clones of them.