Enda Kenny recently claimed that as "a Celtic and Christian people, we understand better than most the special challenges of immigration and integrating new communities". The Fine Gael leader was trying to stimulate a debate on immigration. Fair enough. But it doesn't bode well if the picture of the Irish today is based on a myth. It's surprising to find a speech by a political leader of the twenty-first century whose basic premises are so fundamentally ahistorical. The idea of a Celtic people was an invention by nineteenth century nationalists and which in turn was based on an arbitrary classification by philologists of certain European languages as 'Celtic' and from which certain racial characteristic were inferred.
There's an excellent little book in the Very Short Intoduction series by Oxford University Press by Barry Cunliffe called The Celts. I read this last year and it really ought to be read by anyone interested in how racial or nationalist myths are propagated. Cunliffe cautions against "two comfortable old myths". The first is that that there was a "coming of the Celts" - either to Britain or Ireland. The assumption that culture must arise from invasions comes from mindsets laid down during the 18th and 19th centuries, when imperial and colonial experience, together with the dominance of classical studies within the educational system, saw invasion and colonisation as the sole begetters of change. "Invasionism" has since given way to a diffusionism based on economic, migratory and cultural communication as the best way to explain these commonalities.
The second myth is that there was a pan-Celtic Europe counterposed to the dominant Mediterranean Greek and Roman cultures at the time. That there might have been such a commonly recognised civilisation arises from the way in which the classicals' use of the word Celts to describe peripheral barbarians was taken up by philologists studying European languages, also in the 18th and 19th centuries. They classified them into a single family tree of Indo-European languages. Since then Irish nationalists have embedded their vision of national identity within a distinctly Celtic setting, making this essentialist notion the basis of all things Irish and embodying all manner of national, or more accurately, racial, characteristics. All sorts of things from artistic creativity to fondness for alcohol can thus be attributed to the Celtic genes that reside in all of us.
Does this really matter? Doesn't everyone have their national myths and invented traditions? Of course they do but not every political leader would make an important speech on immigration by encapsulating such a stereotype. There's a danger in seeing immigrants as an undifferentiated alien 'other'. By seeing 'ourselves' as having a lineage stretching back so far into history is just the obverse of this. It's important to be clear about our past and not romanticise it, and we should not project certain characteristics onto ourselves just because we might find it comforting in some way. The overwhelming archaeological evidence points to the fact that no racial or ethnic group in Ireland in the ancient or medieval period was known or identified as Celtic.
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