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I'm Irish.. This is such bullshit..

"you probably think a wake is just another Irish piss up, a few beers around the corpse and an open coffin."

Thats exactly what is is in my experience.

"But amongst the Celts this ancient form of death-sharing lives on."

Celts wtf? We Irish are slightly more inbred that on the continent but the entire European population has been thoroughly blended for 100's of years. No-one is a Celt. No-one here would ever mention ancient demographic groups in reference to modern day events.

Stopped reading after that.

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> the entire European population has been thoroughly blended for 100’s of years.

This is not true. There’s more than a bit of population substructure within Ireland. Norman and English names are over represented among Fine Gael politicians, Gaelic derived ones among Fianna Fáil. The people in the Northwest are visibly different than in Leinster, more red heads (Celts), more people who could pass as Spanish ( the pre-Celtic population).

And the idea that European populations have been thoroughly blended is absurd. If you walk into an Aldi in Limerick you’ll see the same as as in Leipzig albeit in a different language. The girl looks German, not Irish. And Norwegians don’t look like Portuguese.

Thoroughly agree. Ireland has many accents, many of them very strong. This is common in cultures where people stay in a locality for most of their lives. There is recent mobility (in the last 50 years for work, education etc) but most families have been stationary in their home towns for multiple generations. Even the Irish spoken in each area is distinctive.

No idea why you were downvoted like that. I'm a nominal Brit with a lot of Irish influence. Reverse those nationalities and you could say the same - which you pretty much did.

I have a similar experience of wakes as you - they are quite often a damn good piss up and quite rightly so.

As to the Celts thing, that is rather more complicated. In England there is a pejorative term: the "Celtic fringe" which probably doesn't help here! Celtic-ism seems to me to be a bit of an amalgam of some real historic fact and rather a lot of rose tinted, backwards glancing pseudo nationalism and a lot of bollocks. I won't go further on that, otherwise this comment will become an essay but as you say: "... ancient demographic groups in reference to modern day events" - where's the relevance: we've moved on a bit since 55/54BC etc?

Presumably the 'Celtic fringe' is the flip-side to the 'Protestant ascendancy' which is just a bit of neat propaganda tied with a bow to justify and perpetuate the historical into the future.

Had a wake for my father some years ago. While there was a lot of alcohol there was great comfort in the many stories that everyone had of him and had no issue in laughing over. My family always has held wakes and probably always will.

The genetic distribution of the European population is not blended to the point of indistinguishability.

https://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_Y-DNA_haplogroups.shtml

It is still right to say it's highly anachronistic to call modern people Celts. Not to mention most countries of the former Roman empire have been home to Celts.

Define "Celt".

People the Romans conquered, then assimilated in places like northern Italy and modern France. That their languages survived relatively isolated a while longer in places like Britain and Ireland is why we think of them as being from there.

Without looking around at all, I recall that only Tacitus mentions the "Keltike", which is a Greekism and not Roman, so I'm probably wrong a bit. I believe that there are very, very few refs to Celts pre-modern revivalism. I think Tacitus mentions them as located in what we would think of as Belgium (nee bit of France, sort of).

I think that Celt is generally confused with Briton (Preton/Pretanike - Pytheas) thanks to some fanciful thinking over the last few hundred years. You might also notice: Britany - a region of modern France. The "indigenous" Britons were duffed up by various invaders. The Scots migrated from Ireland and the Picts went the other way etc etc. Angles and Saxons, Norwegians and Danes farted around at various times (we had a King Knut/Canute famous for talking to the sea - he didn't really - he was emphasising how the sea is unstoppable (or was he!)

These isles off of the left hand side of mainland Europe have a pretty complicated history but perhaps not as complicated as say what we now know as France, Germany, Italy and co.

The Celt thing is a bit ambiguous at best ...

You are right. The term is over-used, and many of the original tribes have very much blended. Some however, have not (dark green in map) Here is a good list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Celtic_tribes

It's useful to have a term to refer to the Irish, Scots and Welsh. In a modern context "Celtic" is normally used to refer to those places, and more to refer to a common culture rather than an ethnicity.

Uh, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts_(modern)

(I'm a Dubliner and I would accept the label.)

“Celts” normally refers to people from regions with a historically Celtic language and cultural influence, these days; it’s not meaningfully an ethnic group today.

OK, I will start calling Italians Romans from now on.

The Romans were Trojans, according to Virgil. They defeated the Italians in battle, and abducted women to marry.

I’m pretty sure the people of Rome call themselves romans.

It's a piss up when the death is somewhat expected or of "natural order". The very elderly, etc.

Wakes for young people are very very different and difficult as are wakes for people who died before their time or who have left young families behind.

And you're right about the word Celt being bullshit but we definitely consider ourselves distinct in culture.

> Stopped reading after that.

Uh, and you were doing so well. That meme should crawl in to a corner and die.

I stopped reading after that. (It was the last thing you wrote :) )

I have no idea what you are referencing.

It's a common thing now for a comment on some text to identify done objectionable line and say "stopped reading after you said react was a framework not a library" or whatever. It's a really condescending way to indicate disagreement with a part of an article, and dismiss the author.

If you stopped reading you don’t really have the right to comment, not any more than someone who didn’t read at all.

“Stopped reading” usually means you fixed an interpretation of what the author said and presumed the rest without giving them the courtesy of actually verifying what they wrote is what you think it is. That’s rude and a cognitive bias that weakens quality discourse.

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