Celtic Ireland

Celtic Ireland. A now discredited concept based on the premiss that large numbers of Celtic settlers from mainland Europe came to Ireland some time in the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. They are supposed to have brought with them the language that was to become Irish, and to have replaced a mixed and complex cultural and genetic history, at least 7,000 years in the making, with a new Celtic culture and Celtic ethnicity. The present, very widespread misuse of the term ‘Celtic’ to describe anything Irish has led to its virtual abandonment as a cultural descriptor by archaeologists, who now mostly subscribe to a minimalist model of small‐scale incursions by Celtic warrior‐adventurers during the Iron Age and perhaps proto‐Celtic warriors late in the preceding Bronze Age. That there was indeed small‐scale but high‐impact inward movement by people who, if not strictly Celts, were linguistically and culturally their heirs, cannot be doubted. Such incursions brought, for instance, the elements that make up the Irish La Tène Iron Age and the term ‘Celtic’ could, with some justification, be applied to artefacts and art styles that belong to that cultural milieu.

The most established scholastic use of the term ‘Celtic’ is to describe the group of languages, of which Irish is one, that appears to be derived from, or is closely allied to, the tongue spoken by the mid‐European Celtic peoples in the centuries immediately before Christ (see irish language). However, given that the notion of a major incursion of Celts into Ireland is unsupportable (see iron age), the mechanism by which the language of the Celts became the Irish language remains to be explained. In the oldest known document containing a significant number of Irish tribe‐ and place‐names—the 2nd‐century Cosmography of Ptolemy of Alexandria—many of the name‐forms seem to be non‐Celtic. It would appear, therefore, that the language of a small Celtic aristocracy ousted the indigenous language to become the sole Irish tongue by the 6th century.

There can be no doubt that some Celts reached Ireland during the later part of the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, and that they were responsible for what became the dominant language. To describe the Irish people or their culture as ‘Celtic’, however, is a nonsense that fails to take account of the influence of the many races and cultures that have contributed to their long and complex history.

Richard Warner