-The very fact that you find resin from the Mediterranean in his hair suggests we were trading with that region.

 

-Ireland's position as an island doesn't isolate it in ancient times. It makes it more accessible because travel by sea is much easier than travel over land. 

 

Clonycavan Man gives us our first sight of an Irishman. And here in the National Museum we see some of the finest examples of what we now consider Celtic art. But the idea of the Irish as racially Celtic, unlike the Anglo-Saxon English, belongs to the 19th century. For nationalists and their English enemies much depended on belonging to an imagined finer race.

 

-So was Clonycavan Man a Celt?

 

-He would have been Celtic in the sense that he would have spoken a Celtic language. He would have spoken an early form of the Gaelic language, the Irish language. And the art is associated with Celtic people on the continent. I don't think it means that we are racially descended from a Celtic nation. Genetically this man doesn't have a lot to do with the Gauls of France, or the Celts of central Europe as described by the Greeks and the Romans. And..

 

-So we Irish, let me just nail this one down because it's critical. We are no more racially Celtic than our English neighbours, are we?

 

-No, we are no more so nor less so. Our cousins on the other island have certainly as much a claim to their Celtic past I think as we have.