Caomhín de Barra's The Coming of the Celts begins with an interesting historical coincidence. On Easter Monday, 1916, Patrick Pearse stood at the entrance to the General Post Office in Dublin and declared an Irish Republic. Pearse had begun his career as an advocate for the revival of the Irish language before advancing to cultural nationalism more broadly and eventually to militant republicanism. While the Easter Rising raged (and while the British state dealt with its long aftermath), the prime minister at Westminster was David Lloyd George, another Celtic language enthusiast—to date, the only British prime minister whose first language was not English. Lloyd George was a Welsh nationalist of a type who had involved himself in an attempt to organize a Welsh home rule party in the 1890s. Both “Pearse and Lloyd George … were Celts” (3), whatever that mythic term might mean. Both were nationalists. Yet, where Irish nationalism moved toward a telos outside of the union, twentieth-century Welsh national identity was able to reconcile itself to the United Kingdom. De Barra's goal here is to explain this congruence and simultaneous divergence in the histories of Irish and Welsh nationalisms.

In the book's first three chapters, de Barra excavates a number of different tributaries to the Welsh-Irish connections in the years before and after 1916. Where Celts had once served to name a number of different tribes from Roman times, it was transformed in the nineteenth century into a unifying term for those (mainly rural) peoples living in Ireland, the Scottish G à idhealtachd, Wales, and Brittany, and sometimes also Cornwall and the Isle of Man. And within this broader (and very constructed) Celtic world, Irish and Welsh nationalists developed a set of parallel interests in each other. Irish-language revivalists like Pearse, organizing under the auspices of the Gaelic League, were intrigued by Wales, a “Celtic Paradise,” where they imagined English had been vanquished and replaced by a resurgent Welsh. De Barra aptly calls this “the Welsh parable” (43), a strategically deployed story that served as a convenient model for the Gaelic League's ultimate goal of a fully bilingual Ireland. Another element of the “Welsh parable” was often a dose of anti-Welsh feeling; the Welsh were accused of having lost “every spark of national sentiment” (51). Thus, the parable could prod the Irish to pursue what even the deracinated Welsh had apparently accomplished. Indeed, Irish nationalists were often openly dismissive about the tírín (wee country) of Wales. By the early twentieth century, the anti-Welsh sentiment inherent in the parable became more overt. Lloyd George's rise to prime minister was seen in Irish nationalist circles as evidence of how misguided the Welsh had become and how sadly assimilated into the British state they were.

While (mostly) laudatory Irish attitudes to the Welsh gave way to critique, Welsh perceptions of the Irish went in the opposite direction. Contempt was replaced by (mostly) respect. The Welsh language has a long-standing anti-Irish vocabulary: the specific term for an Irishman, Gwyddel, comes from gwŷdd (wild, barbaric, uncultivated). The famous Welsh bard Iolo Morganwg had baldly claimed in 1799 that “an Irishman's loves are three: violence, deception and poetry” (72). And for much of the nineteenth century, “the Welsh public had a generally negative impression of Ireland. Unflattering depictions of the Irish people were common in the Welsh press” (69). Welsh anti-Irishism was also partly a product of the general British antipathy toward Irish nationalism and agrarian unrest, as well as a long-standing anti-Catholicism. Yet by 1900 or so, the main demands of Welsh nationalists—disestablishment of the Anglican Church, land reform, and a measure of local government—all mirrored major contemporary campaigns in Ireland. Welsh nationalists began to think that Irish methods might be apposite to these concerns. Thus, there was a growing sense of shared Pan-Celtic identity in Wales. And yet, Welsh interest in Irish politics was never as uncritical as the obverse interest; the presence of Irish immigrants in Welsh towns and cities played a role here, preventing the emergence of any romanticized narratives. And the lingering suspicion of Irish people's supposed propensity for violence never really disappeared.

In subsequent chapters, de Barra switches to focus on the broader history of the Pan-Celticism within which these Irish-Welsh connections were made. Arguably, the creator of Pan-Celticism was one Charles de Gaulle, a minor French poet and uncle of his more famous namesake. De Gaulle had developed an early interest in Breton, Welsh, and Irish and “also suggested creating a new Celtic language, with words borrowed from the common roots of Celtic words, so that the Celtic people could communicate with one another without having to resort to English or French” (107–8). De Gaulle organized the first Pan-Celtic congress, held at St. Brieuc, Brittany in 1867. By 1888, there was a Pan-Celtic Society in operation in Dublin, with eighty-four listed members (sixty-four men, twenty women). But as de Barra observes, “The most striking aspect of the Pan-Celtic Society was that there was nothing particularly Pan-Celtic about it” (111). It was a mainly literary club, with an almost exclusive focus on Ireland (though with one Welsh-speaking member). It lasted only three years. The mantle of Pan-Celticism in Ireland was then taken up by Edmund Edward Fournier D'Albe, an English-born physics lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. But for all his fanciful (and convenient) claims to be of Breton extraction with familial ties to the Scottish Highlands, Fournier's Celtic Association floundered in Ireland. The desire to focus on something larger than Ireland was resisted by those who specifically wished to stay focused on Irish affairs and Irish concerns. Irish-language revivalists, for example, remained hostile to him. Religion played a role here also. The use of quasi-druidic symbolism (“Protestants playing pagans,” as de Barra calls it [121]) was a red flag for the Catholic-dominated Gaelic League, as was the “Pan-Celtic obsession with ceremony and costume” generally (149). However, this observation does miss the fact that the Gaelic League was itself often given over to costumery and pageants, as Joan Dean's recent book (All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry [2014]) has shown. It was perhaps not the costumes themselves, but their implied political and religious content. The fear that Pan-Celtic solidarity would further incorporate Ireland into the union was another concern. The Gaelic League feared the “dual identity” that Pan-Celticism proffered.

Fournier switched to holding transnational congresses, and his Pan-Celtic vision seemed to find a happier reception in Wales. Though even here, as de Barra shows, there were problems. Irish and Scottish guests at various sessions of the annual Eisteddfod seemed to be greeted warmly, but the demand of Scottish Gaels that they be allowed hold displays of Highland dancing offended the religious sensibilities of Welsh nonconformists. Irish attendees were irked by the Eisteddfod’s royalism and toasts to the crown, and the recurrent sense of Irish nationalist superiority over the Welsh “did not go unnoticed” (175). As Clive Betts said in A Oedd Heddwch, his 1978 study of the Eisteddfod, the Celts “were all great friends until they looked closely at each other” (156). With the Easter Rising and the subsequent War of Independence in Ireland, there were even greater divisions between Irish nationalists and their erstwhile cousins in Wales and Scotland. The term “diluted Celts” was thrown around to describe those who shied away from separatist nationalisms. A Celtic Congress in 1919 was riddled by serious political divisions, as well as the machinations of Ruaraidh Erskine, a Scottish nationalist who sought to win over followers for his planned Celtic communist league.

In his discussion of Pan-Celticism, De Barra moves productively from intellectual and cultural history to the organizational history of the groups involved and the social milieux in which they operated. And he has a fine eye for anecdotal evidence to enliven his analyses. Thus, the entire book becomes a kind of alternative history of a Pan-Celtic macro-nationalism that never grew to full fruition. Drawing on material in Irish, Welsh and English, The Coming of the Celts is an engaging and subtly sophisticated work, sympathetic to its multinational subject matter while still holding a due skepticism of various misty nationalist claims about ancient racial purities and Celtic communalism. Studies of nationalism—both in Ireland and elsewhere—are often inward-looking and even solipsistic. De Barra's approach—transnational, trilingual, interdisciplinary—showcases a profitable alternative approach.