The Celts
Who were the Celts?
Today Ireland is known as the ‘Celtic tiger’ of Europe, but is this just a marketing ploy?
Dan Bradley of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin wanted to examine the modern Celtic myth – that the populations of Ireland and Britain were founded by Celtic invasions from Europe. His team collected DNA from all over Europe in a search for evidence of a genetic link across the Celtic world, thus proving that Celts migrated to the British Isles. The results were surprising.
No great migration
Genetically the people along what is called the ‘Atlantic façade’ – that is, the western fringe of Europe extending from northern Spain to western Norway and including the islands of Britain and Ireland – share a similarity, and genetic difference becomes greater as you move towards central Europe. This sits very well with what we know about the Celtic languages, but it isn’t evidence for any great migration.
‘The Irish have always been here, as have the Welsh and the Scots,’ says Dan Bradley. ‘I think it’s very credible that the populations of these islands haven’t changed that much since the start of farming 6,000 years ago.’ This means that most of the people of Britain and Ireland have been here for thousands of years, long before the word ‘Celt’ was coined by the Greeks.
A sense of identity
Whoever the Celts were, they were not defined by race, creed or language. Yet the idea of the ‘Celts’ has gripped the European imagination for over 2,000 years. For most of this time, they have played the role of ‘noble savage’, but far from being barbarians, they were highly sophisticated.
There never was a European Celtic empire. Rather it was a diverse tribal Europe, lived in by people who shared common beliefs and fiercely kept their independence. However, it was also once a Europe that may have spoken a shared language and traded goods and ideas over thousands of miles.
In modern times, the Celts have been romanticised and given mystical qualities. We have projected on them all our fantasies of a mythical golden age. Yet the Celts did have a sense of memory and knew exactly who they were and where they came from, while we have lost our connections to kin and clan. However, while the modern Celtic identity is a more of a myth than reality, some sense of identity does exist in the community of nations on the Atlantic coast of Europe.
