Thoughts on Galicia?

[Damion]

"But imagining that this was one "nation" of cultural or political unity"

As I don't know anyone who has ever said that they were unified politically and certainly not here, that's what's referred to as a strawman argument. As for culture, I'll go by how their neighbours grouped them and how archaeology has backed that up.

The Celts existed as a group of people.

People today don't define themselves as humans, we define ourselves by a myriad of identities, none of which stop us being human.

Or to put it using a modern example, gangs belong to a certain culture, they follow certain rules, believe in certain things, often dress in a particular way. Members don't define themselves as gangsters though, they define themselves by what gang they belong to. Having a local group identity doesn't preclude them from belonging to a meta identity of gangster, particularly for outsiders like ourselves judging them by our social norms.

Going back to modern Celtic identity then, there needs to be some common ground that joins these disparate groups together. So far the six nations of the Celtic League have done so based on having a Celtic language. I really don't know how much Celtic culture survives in Cornwall, or Manx for that matter which seems as much Norse as Celtic. The others though have a strong body of poetry, history and legend to link them to their Celtic past.
It's not like the term Celtic is copyrighted, though to have any semblance of meaning it should have minimum standards such as a group that maintains/promotes a Celtic language.
The English region of Cumbria was once a Celtic speaking area, there was even survival of some words into recent times, notably the yan tan tethera system of counting sheep. Cumbrians are not Celts though, they're Anglo-Saxons like the rest of England. Their ancestors were Celts (and Norse, and actual Angles) but today they are Germanic English with next to nothing remaining of the old Cumbrian culture. Had they not been anglicised, the Cumbrians today would have a similar culture to the Welsh but they were and they don't.

Perhaps the Galicians have legends that go back to their Celtic past, I have no idea, but the reality is that they speak a Latin based language and Celtic probably hasn't been spoken in the region (later British immigrants aside) for 2000 years.

Apparently the language spoken by the Galicians was a q-celtic language like Gaelic rather than Welsh which is p-celtic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallaecian_language

Perhaps the Galicians could adopt Gaelic as their language or even Modern Gaulish - a contrived language:

http://www.moderngaulish.com/