GUEST,

Just because something "seems obvious to you" doen't make it true. First of all, you have your dates wrong. In the 60s the Chieftains were not in nappies; the band was founded in 1963. Other Irish revival bands, such as the Dubliners, were successful even earlier. And the precursor to the Chieftains, Sean O Riada's Ceoltiori Cualann, had been active since the 50s.

I'm sure you know this already, GUEST, but what was going on in many places in Europe in the 60s, and to a greater extent the 70s, was a rediscovery of folk music based initially on what was happening in Ireland. I have talked to bands from as far apart as Madrid and Helsinki, and they both said "of course it was the 70s, so we were all playing Irish music." After this, most of the regions of Europe realized that they could apply the same principles to their own music, so you got bands like Gunnfjauns Kapell in Sweden and La Musgana in Spain, Malicorne and Melusine in France, La Ciapa Rusa in Italy, etc., playing their own folk music, but using principles of arrangement derived from or inspired by the Irish revival; and most of these bands were made up of people who had previously played in "Celtic" bands. Milladoiro falls into this category.

Many peoples all over Eurasia are attracted to the romance of the "Celtic" label. I once interviewed a Turkish musician who said, "of course, Turkish music is just Celtic music. The Turks are Proto-Celtic." In the 1950s, many groups were claiming Celtic heritage. A few regions, notably Galicia, decided that they would simply claim to BE Celtic as a mark of regional identity and a marketing device; in this they were inspired by the example of Brittany in France. But again, the Galicians are no more Celtic than anyone in (say) Paris, which had a Celtic language and culture more recently.

This is not to say that they are "not Celtic at all," whatever that might mean. Clearly, like Parisians (whose state-sponsored history textbooks used to begin "nos ancestres les Gauloises..."), Galicians are descended from Celtic peoples among others. But the culture did not survive the years of domination by other groups. Gallego is mutually comprehensible with Portuguese, not Irish.

open mike, what you say about Brittany is correct. They are Celtic in the most important and verifiable sense: they have a living Celtic language. They are descended primarily from a colony of British Celts (hence the name) who went there in the 5th and 6th century. The rest of the French are descended from some combination of Gauls (a Celtic group), Franks (A Germanic group), Normans (A Scandinavian group), etc, etc. This is why in both my posts I said as Celtic as Paris, not as Celtic as France!