As far as I know, many of the Celts on the British Isles began to primarily use Latin and Greek alphabets to write their languages in.
The Ogham script was used primarily in Old Irish, but were there not also Welsh uses as well?
So my primary question is: what exactly was wrong with the Ogham script? Was Roman influence really so large that their alphabet was somehow preferable?
Thanks!
This is from my knowledge of the 5th and 6th Centuries, I don't know how the use of Ogam progressed from there. The immediate precursor to this question is that we have hardly any evidence of how this change occurred, and much of the history written around this period relies on modern anthropological and sociological theories as opposed to hard evidence.
For instance, while we know that there may well have been a St. Patrick who brought over the bible at some point in the 4th or 5th century, we don't know exactly when or how this occurred. It is generally accepted however that it was the bible, more than 'Roman influence' which would have caused this transformation, given that Ireland was never colonised and most likely did not have extensive contact with them. However, aspects of the bible and Christianity at this time carried elements of 'Romanness', but we cannot say the influence was direct.
Ogam had very limited uses at the time - in most cases it was simply used to denote to mysticism of an object, or to signify a God. It could hardly match the panoply of uses there were for Latin at the time, for instance in trade, tax, public administration, the arts etc. It is likely that rather than to attempt a translation of it into a semi-formed alphabet, as Ulfilas did with the Goths in the 4th century, it was easier for missionaries to just teach the Irish of the time to read Latin. This wasn't a result of Roman influence but rather functionality. In Scotland Ogam was eventually adapted in the 10th century for the purposes of teaching the bible.
Ireland had extremely low levels of literacy in the early medieval period. Despite being one of the first areas to produce large numbers of monasteries, and send missionaries to the continent, literary culture amongst the laity didn't really take hold until around the 12th/13th Century at the earliest. A historical puzzle at the moment is how the Irish managed to develop and retain law schools and an extremely complex law system transmitted (as far as we are aware) orally, for around 500 years before this - a feat most modern anthropologists would class as impossible.
Source: J. M. H. Smith, Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000 (2005)