Gaelic Culture Quotes

Singing in Gaelic is very, very natural to do. I think lends itself very much so to being sung.

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

I'll tell you what, it doesn't get more beautiful than the west of Ireland. Connemara and County Derry are quite stunning, really.

My first language is Gaelic.

When I do Gaelic music, I've learned about Gaelic culture; I've tried to learn the language. Whenever I do mouth music and there's Gaelic speakers in the audience, and they come up and go, 'Good job,' I'm always like, 'Phew.'

When I was a kid, if you didn't speak Irish, you really wanted to. And you played Gaelic games and you didn't pay any attention to what was happening in the outside world, because really, Ireland was the center of the universe. And I don't think that's the case anymore. Although, admittedly, it is the center of the universe.

If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on.

The Black Watch is one of the most illustrious regiments. They've been at the vanguard of British military operations for 400 years. Something they're very proud of is what they call 'The Golden Thread,' where you can trace a line back from them to the first Black Watch soldiers who were from the Highlands, spoke Gaelic, and wore the kilt.

It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan.

The school I went to was so Gaelic that you learned how to play the tin whistle and how to Irish-dance in class.

"Sassenach." He had called me that from the first; the Gaelic word for outlander, a stranger. An Englishman. First in jest, then in affection.

I used to go to a Gaelic class on a Saturday morning, but I never felt myself that I could speak it properly.

Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.