Some of that lot still speaks Gaelic, unlike most of the European lot.
A) I'm a (Scots) Gaelic-learner myself who as we know will not shut up about the Highland Clearances, so I feel I have a Sino-Nixonian right to say that fluency was a Celtic language has bugger all to do with whether you belong to the Celtic nations or not. Irishness is a state of mind, my grannie said, and parts of Ireland have spoken some sort of English since Norman times, or Scots since about the time Boston was being founded.
B) Taken as a proportion of the populations claiming Irishness, I doubt the number of Americans fluent in Gaelic is greater than the number of Irish. This statement is, frankly, outright misleading: most Irish don't speak Irish, and, ah, most 'Irish' don't speak Irish either. Persons who speak Irish are unlike the majority of persons, who don't speak Irish? Well, yes...
Pardon me for saying so - I know I'm being terribly presumptive - but between this, your making the same argument for Scotland (which is even less valid, you hear it from a Lothian man with Orcadian roots), and the idea that "English nationalists" would for some reason oppose Scottish independence when obviously teh reverse is true I wonder whether you don't have something of a bone to pick with Saxon civilisation.

