Ok Obie - I think you are stating an accepted dogma and I would not want to disagree with it; however the standard account makes very little sense to the unread observer. Two facts that I think need stating, A Galician IS more like Welsh than anyother language and, B Galician is still widely used in Galicia

A more consistent account would be that the Galician speaking Socts migration to Ireland found a Gaelic speaking population, and that having integrated these Scots adopted Gaelic.

Next any attempt to explain further the origins of Gaelic by drawing conclusions from vague similarities to Indo languages is bound to be MISTAKEN since I can find lots of similarities to Asian languages - indeed by these same criteria we could begin to conlude that Gaelic is an Artic dialect or something equally ridiculus.

For one thing we know concepts and technology did often travel across Eurasia, and some of these -no doubt- would have been the same SOUND so one could be duped into accouting an origin to a whole family of SOUNDS - ie a language - from the similarity of a few. This I think is av error.

I think that using a few similarities between two REMOTE language areas does not explain anything other than that ideas travel; that if we start that kind of thing we might just as easily have claimed that the British Isles were the cradle of civilization from which all IndoEuropean languages grew; so I think this method is invalid.

A far more likely account of preceltic people/languages in Britain would begin in the Atlantic Islands where are still found traces of fair races. It is here that some try to relate Euskera ( what Mr Douglas calls Basque ) or some elements of it to African/Iberian dialects. Indeed I read some accounts that assert that the Canaries were once Atlantis, and as such it would have had a very elaborate developed language.

I am more inclined to believe that preceltic history is also a time of great geological change and that therefore people and culture could have simply walked across land into Britian - FROM the west, than to believe influnces came - by 747?????? - from Asia or India or indeed anywhere that far away.