The Celts were well established in Ireland a century before Christ resisting challenges and absorbing influences from other cultures for many centuries more.

They had arrived in Ireland more two thousand years before.

The term Celtic denotes a group of Indo-European languages, the Celts had come to be known in an area comprising Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, invaded northern Spain and sackomg Rome.

The Celts were not the first inhabitants of Ireland. Immigrants probably crossed the narrow sea from Scotland to the Antrim. Next came the first farmers who used stone implements for felling trees. The metalworkers arrived with a new group of settlers

These were the dominant people in Ireland in the late Bronze Age when the Celts arrived.

They seem to have moved into Ireland in two waves, one directly from the continent into the west of the country and the other through Britain into northeast Ireland

The Picts in the north and other pre-Celtic peoples were overthrown and they became a part of the Celtic language and culture

St. Patrick brought the Christian faith in the mid-fifth century.

The Celts left many marks on Ireland and its people that have remained. There are thousands of habitation sites dotting the landscape, the bulk of the country's place names and family names, the majority of its saints and missionaries, its finest manuscripts, sculptures and metalwork, one of the earliest vernacular literatures in Europe, the majority language of the island until the Famine

Today, the term Celtic is often used to describe the languages and respective cultures of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall