The impact of speech and language technology for the endangered language depends on the extent to which the language community engages with its development. In this paper, the range of speech technologies and applications developed for Irish in the ABAIR initiative in Trinity College Dublin is presented, along with reflections on the many ways in which the language community has come to play an increasingly central role. Community involvement and buy-in is essential for all aspects – not only for the development of core technologies, such as speech synthesis and recognition systems – but to prompt development directions, to determine priorities for the most important and urgently needed applications and to collaborate in their provision. In order for technology to achieve its potential for the endangered language, developers need a knowledge of the language and an understanding of the socio- linguistic context in which the technologies will be used.