Ireland and Scotland are the two most prominent Gaelic-speaking Celtic nations, and their Celtic identities are often grouped together in popular usage. Yet the Celtic identity of modern Ireland and Scotland developed along strikingly different lines, shaped by distinct religious histories, political relationships with England, the survival or loss of the Gaelic language, and the very different ways in which the medieval and early modern past has been remembered. The broader survey of the Celtic legacy today traces these traditions side by side, but the contrasts between them are as important as the common ground they share.
Shared Origins in Gaelic Civilisation
The two traditions begin from a common foundation. Both the Irish and the Scottish Gaels descend from the same broad Goidelic-speaking population that spread across the Atlantic coast of Europe in the late prehistoric period, and the Celtic language family of which Irish and Scottish Gaelic are both members emerged from this shared inheritance. Classical Irish, the literary language of medieval Ireland and Scotland, was effectively a single language used on both sides of the North Channel, and the bardic schools of Gaelic Scotland trained poets in a tradition that was continuous with that of Ireland.
The medieval Gaelic world of Ireland and Scotland was a single cultural zone in many respects. The scoto-Irish monastic tradition of the sixth to ninth centuries, in which Irish monks played a central role in the conversion of Scotland, created a common religious culture. The later medieval Gaelic lordships of Scotland, the Gàidhealtachd, were ruled by kin-groups who saw themselves as sharing a common Gaelic civilisation with the lords of Ireland, and the heroic tales of the Fenian cycle and the Mythological cycle circulated freely between the two countries. It was only in the early modern period that the two traditions began to diverge in fundamental ways.
The Religious Divide
The single most important difference between Irish and Scottish Celtic identity is religious. Ireland remained overwhelmingly Roman Catholic after the Reformation, while Scotland became divided between a Calvinist Protestant Lowland majority and a still largely Catholic Highland and Islands region. The result was that the older Celtic heritage came to be associated in Ireland with the Catholic and nationalist tradition as a whole, while in Scotland it became entangled with a much more complicated confessional politics.
In Ireland, the preservation of the Gaelic language, the Catholic religion, and the broader sense of a distinct Irish identity were seen as parts of a single project of cultural survival. The Catholic Church was, for much of the modern period, a major patron of the Irish language and of the Celtic art and craftsmanship of the country, and the Celtic crosses in the great monastic graveyards of Ireland are themselves monuments to this fusion. The Irish state, even after its substantial secularisation in the late twentieth century, retains a constitutional acknowledgement of the special position of the Catholic heritage, and the cultural symbolism of Celtic Ireland continues to be read through a largely Catholic lens.
In Scotland, by contrast, the Celtic identity is split across a Catholic minority and a Calvinist majority in the Gaelic-speaking regions. The long history of religious conflict in the Highlands, including the campaigns against Catholic and Episcopalian Jacobitism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made the Highland and Islands a much more religiously mixed region than Ireland. The Free Church of Scotland, the dominant church of the nineteenth-century Highlands, was at best indifferent and at times actively hostile to the older Gaelic cultural inheritance, and the clearances of the period disrupted the Gaelic-speaking communities in ways that have no Irish equivalent. The result is that Scottish Celtic identity today is a more religiously plural, and at times more religiously contested, phenomenon than the Irish one.
The Survival of the Language
The fortunes of the Gaelic language on the two sides of the Irish Sea are also very different. Irish remained the majority language of Ireland well into the nineteenth century and has retained a small but symbolically important Gaeltacht population to this day. The constitutional position of Irish as the first official language of the Republic, the compulsory teaching of Irish in the schools, and the broadcasting presence of TG4 and RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta have all helped to keep the language in public life, even if the number of daily speakers outside the education system has continued to decline.
Scottish Gaelic, by contrast, has lost almost all of its historical heartland. The language, which once extended over the whole of the Highlands and most of the Lowland periphery, retreated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the combined pressure of the clearances and emigration, the educational and ecclesiastical policies of the Presbyterian church, and the integration of the Scottish economy into the British one. The modern Gaelic-speaking population is concentrated in the Western Isles and in small pockets of the western mainland, and the language has the status of an official language of Scotland under the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act of 2005, but it does not have the same constitutional centrality in Scottish life that Irish has in Irish life.
Politics and the Symbolism of the Past
The political meaning of Celtic identity is also profoundly different in the two countries. In Ireland, the Celtic heritage was a central element of the cultural nationalism that produced the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence, and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The iconography of modern Ireland, from the harp on the official seal to the Celtic cross in the national cemeteries, draws on a vision of a distinctively Irish past that is broadly continuous with the Celtic revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Celtic identity of the Republic is, in other words, the identity of a sovereign state built on a particular vision of its own past.
In Scotland, by contrast, the Celtic identity is one element in a broader Scottish identity that also includes the Scots-speaking Lowland tradition and the broader British affiliations of much of the Scottish population. The Scottish National Party, the dominant political force in modern Scotland, draws on a Scottish identity that is not exclusively Celtic, and the figure of Robert the Bruce, who is celebrated in the Scottish national memory as a whole, is a Lowland figure. Scottish Celtic identity, in other words, has to coexist with a non-Celtic Scottish identity in a way that has no real parallel in Ireland, where the broader sense of the nation and the Celtic identity are much more nearly coincident.
The Cultural Imaginations of the Two Countries
The popular image of the Celtic past is also strikingly different in the two countries. In Ireland, the image of the ancient past is bound up with the early monastic tradition, the illuminated manuscripts, the round towers, and the heroic tales of the Ulster cycle. The popular image of ancient Ireland is one of a Christian, learned, and largely settled society, the heir of a pre-Christian heroic age. In Scotland, the popular image of the Celtic past is more martial and more romantic, shaped by the Ossianic vogue of the late eighteenth century and by the literature of Sir Walter Scott: the Highland warrior, the clan chief, the bardic tradition, and the wild landscape of the glens. The two images are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct, and they reflect the very different histories that the two countries have had.
Conclusion
The difference between Irish and Scottish Celtic identity is, a difference between two distinct modern cultural projects that happen to share a common medieval inheritance. Ireland has built a national identity that is in substantial part a Celtic identity; Scotland has built a national identity that is broader and that includes the Celtic element as one of several. The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped both traditions, but it did so in different registers, and the result is two related but distinct expressions of what it means to be a Celtic nation today.
Related Topics
- The Celtic identity in modern nations examines the modern Celtic identity of all six Celtic nations in detail.
- The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shaped both Irish and Scottish Celtic identity in profound ways.
- The Celtic languages and oral tradition are central to both Irish and Scottish Gaelic identity.
- The Celtic society, law, and governance of the older Celtic world is the historical foundation for both traditions.
- The history of the Celtic civilization provides the broader chronological and cultural context for the divergence of the two traditions.