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Opinion Our Celtic identity might not be what we think it is

Author Caomhín De Barra asks about Ireland’s Celtic past, and whether it really is what we think it is.

WHENEVER IRISHNESS IS discussed, the word “Celtic” comes to mind. Indeed, “Celtic” is often a synonym to describe things “Irish”. We label things as Celtic music, Celtic art, and Celtic crosses. When we reflect on the personality traits we as a people have, we regularly attribute them to our ancient Celtic ancestry.

In the popular view of Irish history, our island was invaded in the distant past by the Celts, who brought a language and culture that was to dominate Ireland for millennia.

While we now speak English and share much of our culture with the Anglophone world, we still feel our Irish identity is rooted in our Celtic past.

Settled by Celts?

What many don’t appreciate is that the idea that Ireland was once settled by Celts has been called into question by many scholars.

Archeological digs offer scant evidence that there was ever any sudden change in culture in Ireland’s ancient past that we would expect to see if invaders suddenly arrived from the continent.

Whatever about whether the Celts ever did come to Ireland, what is undeniable is that medieval Irish and Welsh writers said absolutely nothing about a Celtic past. Nor did they suggest that the Irish and Welsh people had an affinity for one another based on this shared heritage.

In other words, before the year 1700, no one called the Irish and Welsh Celts. So where did the idea that we are Celts come from?

The story starts in the early eighteenth century. Two linguists, Paul Yves Pezron and Edward Lhuyd, discovered that the Gaelic languages and Brythonic languages (Welsh and Breton) were members of a single language family. Pezron suggested that the people of Brittany were the descendants of the ancient Gauls, who were Celts.

Because of the close similarity of Welsh and Breton, he assumed that Welsh had been brought to Britain from ancient Gaul. Building upon this, Lhuyd hinted that the language family they had discovered should be labelled as “Celtic”.

The problem with Pezron’s idea is that modern archeologists are now confident that the Breton language was brought to France from Britain (and not the other way around). On the basis of a possible misunderstanding, the ancient history of Britain and Ireland was reimagined.

Nevertheless, the Celtic connection with Ireland had been established, but it took time to gain widespread acceptance. My own research has shown that the word Celtic rarely appeared in Irish newspapers in the early nineteenth century. Suddenly, the regularity of its use increased dramatically in the 1840s. It doubled again in the 1850s, and by the 1880s, had doubled once more.

Clearly, something happened between the 1840s and 1860s. But what?

The most important factor in the formation of our Celtic identity was the emergence of a “scientific” understanding of race. Scholars increasingly believed that cultural differences were evidence of biological differences. As many of the academics who worked studying racial biology were also linguists, it is not surprising that knowledge from one field crossed to the other. Each language family was assumed to mark a subspecies of the various human races. The Celtic identity suddenly had a “scientific” basis.

Other contemporary events built upon this. Archeological excavations in Switzerland in the 1850s revealed evidence of an ancient Celtic civilization that had once dominated Europe. Meanwhile, Johann Kaspar Zeuss published Grammatica Celtica in 1853. This was the first scientific analysis of the Celtic language family, and made Celtic studies one of the hottest fields of academic research in the later nineteenth century.

At the same time, writers like Ernest Renan discussed the Celtic influence on modern English and French literature. To do this, they first had to explain what characteristics the “Celts” had. Renan described the modern Celts as romantic, whimsical, emotional and with great powers of imagination. They were very unlike the stoic, rational, hard-working Anglo-Saxons. Such stereotypes still hold considerable influence in how Irish people are perceived today.

Over a twenty-year period, the Celts were established as a biological fact by scientists, given a glorious past by archeologists, a sense of scholarly gravitas by linguists, and identifiable personality traits by litterateurs. This made Celticness attractive to nationalists in Ireland and Wales, and by the turn of the twentieth century, most people in both countries believed they were Celts.

Racial identity

The belief that we share a Celtic identity with the Welsh and the Scottish is still widely held today. But what does this mean? What do we actually have in common with them that we could say points to a common Celtic identity? People might say Celtic music, dancing, or languages. yet these are only practiced or spoken by a small minority in each country and can’t truly be said to unite the three nations.

What links us with our fellow Celts today is a lingering sense of a common racial identity. Of course, in a post-Nazi world, most people steer clear of any association with “blood nationalism”. Yet, subconsciously, that is still at the core of the bond we supposedly share with the Welsh and the Scots.

When the Provisional IRA announced in 1972 that they would not carry out attacks in Scotland or Wales, they justified it by stating that they stood with their “Celtic brothers”.

During the Six Nations next year, count the number of times the players from those countries are called “our Celtic cousins”. “Brothers” and “cousins” are meant as friendly terms, but they also reinforce the idea of a relationship based on common bloodlines.

This probably has never occurred to the vast majority of Irish people. But it has not escaped the notice of those who are interested in race-based identities. White nationalist groups in both Europe and the United States have adopted the Celtic cross as one of their symbols. Stormfront, one of the largest white supremacist websites, uses the Celtic cross as its logo.

Bans have been put in place in Italy and Germany on the use of the Celtic cross at neo-Nazi rallies, as some groups use it to get around bans on swastikas. As the Celtic cross can be imagined as symbolising an ancient, white, pan-European identity, it holds obvious appeal to such groups.

Will Ireland retain its Celtic identity? As the meaning of “Irish” evolves towards greater inclusivity of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and if the link between Celtic symbols and white nationalism gains more attention in mainstream Irish society, hard questions might be asked as to whether “Irish” and “Celtic” are really the same thing.

In the same way that Celticness became a central part of Irishness in the nineteenth century, it is possible that the twenty-first century will witness a disentangling of these identities once more.

The book is called “The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales”. It is published by the University of Notre Dame Press and can be purchased through Amazon or here.

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    Mute Willy Malone
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:00 AM

    Euro has been an unmitigated disaster .
    Certainly from wee Paddy’s perspective, bailing out this disaster .

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    Mute 8bitplebian
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:04 AM

    @Willy Malone: Are you even old enough to remember the punt and what the economy was before the bubble? Newsflash! For almost all the time we had our own currency the country was in recession or close to bankrupt.

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    Mute Bennythekid
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:24 AM

    @8bitplebian: totally agree with you there.in fact can’t see why there can’t be a single world currency.it might cut out all this fluctuation and maybe even some of the corruption.Le Pen fluffed her chances when she misused European Parliament funds.

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    Mute 8bitplebian
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:34 AM

    @Bennythekid: We had big self inflicted recessions in the 30s and 80s. The first was long before the concept of the EU. You can destroy an economy with (Greece) or without (Venezuela) a currency union.

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    Mute Lepanto
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:50 AM

    @8bitplebian:

    So we needed the Euro to bail us out, and in turn we end up bailing it out, bit of a disaster all round.

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    Mute Lepanto
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:52 AM

    @8bitplebian:

    Socialism destroyed Venezuela.. https://youtu.be/WCUq0V-3mgo

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    Mute Barry Somers
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:54 AM

    @8bitplebian: interest rates were also insane back when we had to punt, 18 percent in early eighties. 12 percent in early 90s. Yep, Things were far from better!

    It’s funny that people pay no attention to what previously happened in this country.

    We also bailed out banks back then too, AIB was bailed out back in the days of the punt.

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    Mute Juan Venegas
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    Apr 5th 2017, 9:44 AM

    @8bitplebian: Not quite as black or white. Ireland’s celtic tiger began in the mid 90s when we still had the punt, 2000-2001 were great, once the Euro came into effect in 2002 it kept going, but the economy was already performing well. The unemployment and economics of the past were die to failed policies. It was the change to corporate tax and economic measures from the 90s that gave us a boom and a recession. The Euro just made it more difficult to come out of that recession. Look at Iceland, no Euro, hot rock bottom in 2008 and they are on the top of the world now and has been for a while already.

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    Mute 8bitplebian
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:34 AM

    @Juan Venegas: Couple of points there. The “real” boom appears to have lasted for no more than a few years at best from around 97 to 2001 with the rest being property inspired madness. I’d be hesitant to call that as having anything to do with currency. Also the comparison to Iceland is not a fair one. It has the population of Limerick county and could make a nice enough living just selling fish to the rest of the world.

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    Mute Jorge Thompson
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:46 AM

    @8bitplebian: Or old enough to remember the Pound?

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    Mute Gary Purcell
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:53 AM

    Let’s hope Le Pen wins outright
    It will be the best thing for France

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    Mute Barry Somers
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:56 AM

    @Gary Purcell: yeah, nothing like starting a economic war to make things better for everyone.

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    Mute Diarmuid
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:11 AM

    @Gary Purcell: A brainless populist thug, clearly melting under any form of adult scrutiny.

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    Mute Lepanto
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:32 AM

    @Diarmuid:

    Coming from you that’s a bit rich, wasn’t it you who hoped the EU would give the UK ‘a good hiding’ over Brexit? What did you mean exactly? An invasion? Sanctions? Punishing the voters for actually voting and winning, is a bit sick.

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    Mute 8bitplebian
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:11 AM

    Cue all the comments about how terrible the euro is followed by the usual verbiage about printing our own currency again. Countries like Ireland who grossly mismanage and inflate their economies as in the early 2000′s will eventually experience a crash, irrespective of them being constrained by the rules of a single currency union or not.

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    Mute Ben McArthur
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:31 AM

    @8bitplebian: There’s some truth in that, but being in a single currency removes much of the ability to do the management necessary. FF made an unholy mess of the public finances, but there was very little they could do to prevent the mad accumulation of private debt that was fuelled by the euro.

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    Mute 8bitplebian
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:39 AM

    @Ben McArthur: I think that’s an unknown. When FF faced down the economic crisis in the 80s (created in part by their own 1977 budget) the approach they took made the situation progressively worse even with all the tools they had available. We also had very high inflation and a currency devaluation to worry about. So there’s no reason to think the 2008 crash would have been handled any better.

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    Mute Maurice Bourke
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    Apr 5th 2017, 9:09 AM

    @8bitplebian:
    Correct me if I misunderstand your position but your arguing that our politicians are inept whether in the Euro or not, so its better to stay in it?

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    Mute 8bitplebian
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:29 AM

    @Maurice Bourke: No, more that blaming the single currency for the 2008 crash and subsequent recession is inaccurate. Economic mismanagement can happen with or without the euro. If Ireland had properly regulated its banks and controlled the property bubble, the impact of the then financial crisis would have been much less severe.

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    Mute kingstown
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:30 AM

    Le Pen is as damaged as her father -

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    Mute Diarmuid
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:12 AM

    @kingstown: The fake fight with her daddy is the most cynical political move in decades. And transparent as hell.

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    Mute Fred Jensen
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    Apr 5th 2017, 9:31 AM

    The thing about Le Pen is she could win if she pledged a tough crackdown on non-EU migration, while maintaining the status quo economically and pledging to keep the euro.

    If she just stuck to that issue, she would win.

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    Mute Neil Mcdonough
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:41 AM

    @Fred Jensen: Le Pen might not even get to the 2nd round and there are absolutely no poll results that even suggest that she will win.

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    Mute Fred Jensen
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:43 AM

    @Neil Mcdonough:

    I know. I’m saying she is shooting herself in the foot with her anti-euro rhetoric. Peoples savings would be wiped out. She should just stick purely to the non-EU migration issue if she wants to win.

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    Mute David Fülöp
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    Apr 5th 2017, 11:35 AM

    @Fred Jensen: I don’t understand her point about the Euro. Some countries might do well to leave it, Greece for example ( mainly because they should have never adopted it in the first place ) but there is no way it would benefit France in any way anymore.

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    Mute Frantz Harband
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    Apr 5th 2017, 8:58 AM

    That was by far not the moment of that debate. Macron is the worst that could happen to France,worst than le pen.that guy agree with everyone and can never answer a question. The best moments of the debate came when the so called “petit candidates “started speaking specially Mr asselinaud. Mr poutou or Miss arthaud. Macron telling people that Tx to European Union we were not killing each other what a joke that guy is.

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    Mute Neil Mcdonough
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:43 AM

    @Frantz Harband: “Macron is the worst that could happen to France …” Most people agree, yet the media always give him as favourite. Hmmm…

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    Mute Dave Kelly
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    Apr 5th 2017, 1:09 PM

    @Neil Mcdonough: Like Simon Coveney, he is backed by the bilderburgers

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    Mute Tony Daly
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:21 AM

    Ireland cannot be trusted to manage its own independent currency. Look at what Charlie Haughey did when Ireland did a devaluation. he passed insider information to his cronies so that they could enrich themselves.

    It would be better, in light of the credit bubble from 2002 to 2007, had Ireland not joined the euro because it facilitated a massive credit expansion for non economically productive borrowing but exiting the euro would now be be very damaging.

    Public goverance and economic management in Ireland are very lacking. The Punch and Judy of FG andf FF does not help. It is a Lanigan’s Ball.

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    Mute Dave Kelly
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    Apr 5th 2017, 1:08 PM

    @Neil Mcdonough: Like Simon Coveney, he has the same bilderburgh backing

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    Mute Tony Daly
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:23 AM

    Macron or Le Pen?

    Pragmatists will prefer Macron.

    Ideologues with far right sympathies, Brexit types, will prefer Le Pen.

    At least there is a choice but with choice comes adult responsibility.

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    Mute Neil Mcdonough
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    Apr 5th 2017, 10:38 AM

    @Tony Daly: Listened to the entire debate and some of the commentry this morning. Le Pen has her support but did herself no favours trying to convince anyone else last night. Macron, the candidate of the media did no better. The surprising thing is the media constantly make him favourite yet no-one I know, both from the left and right, can stand him. He’s seen as being more liberal than Fillon, thatcherite even, but mostly an empty vessel who tries to please everyone.
    Melenchon maybe but unlikely, and no-one should write off Fillon yet. If it wasn’t for his affairs with the law, he would stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of stature and experience. Going to be an interesting few weeks!

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    Mute David Fülöp
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    Apr 5th 2017, 11:35 AM

    @Neil Mcdonough: all the French people I know will happily vote Macron.

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    Mute Neil Mcdonough
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    Apr 5th 2017, 11:41 AM

    @David Fülöp: Interesting. That would have been true also a while back for some of my acquaintances, but not anymore. Sound more and more like Vallsozy everyday.

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    Mute Frantz Harband
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    Apr 6th 2017, 2:53 PM

    @David Fülöp: your friends are blind . that guy is a joke. He will the continuation of what’s happening for the last 15 years in France.

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    Mute Rose Sandlewood
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    Apr 5th 2017, 12:58 PM

    I never liked when we switched from the punt to the euro. I found I could get very little with the euro. With the old currency you could get a litre of milk for a pound/punt. With the euro, out can but a bag of chrisps with a euro and then, that’s it. It’s gone. There was no value in the euro. The euro only benefitted those who dealt with mainland Europe often like for holidays or work.

    So I was never a fan of the euro. However we are stuck with it. I don’t like it when I read comments about ditching the euro and going back to the old currency. A new currency will be worthless for a long time and imports into the country would be very expensive and we rely a lot on imports.

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    Mute Guybrush Threepwood
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    Apr 5th 2017, 5:03 PM

    Debates will mean very little. Le Pen hasn’t got a hope. Even if she gets through the first round, she’ll get utterly demolished in the 2nd round of voting.

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    Mute ed w
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    Apr 5th 2017, 1:53 PM

    Another one with lots of rhetoric and no plan just like the brexiteers. Easy to knock something down very difficult to put in a credible alternative. But no one looks at that.

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    Mute Robert Nugent
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    Apr 5th 2017, 1:24 PM

    When Ireland had the punt it was like living in Mexico, there was always the risk of devaluation and currency shocks.

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    Mute Lepanto
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    Apr 5th 2017, 7:52 PM

    @Robert Nugent:

    Soros style devaluation?

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