The Irish Times on the Fake Celtic Cult of Ireland & Britain - & Historic 'Bling'
The man who launched the UK's poisonous Celtic myth in 1707, but only as a linguistic label, not an ethnicity - Edward Lhuyd. Yesterday, we were asked by an American plastic Celt why we negated the 'Celtic culture' of the UK? It was the same as negating the handed-down history of any tribe, she said. Actually not. The passing of time will blur things - and what has been handed down for generations will usually be slightly inaccurate at least - but still have a ring of truth. However, the UK 'Celts' were not a tribe. They didn't exist until 1707, and then it was only a name plucked by a Welsh nationalist scholar as a linguistic label - and since then this horrible fake 'thing' has become an industry and a way of practising racism. Which is how England, the largest and most multi-ethnic country of the UK, suffers the Barnett Formula (reviled by its own creator, the late Lord Joel Barnett), the West Lothian Question and asymmetric national devolution. By t...