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I have long found quite unsatisfactory the popular understanding of how the varieties of language spoken in Great Britain and Ireland are related to each other.
My own rather contrarian take is roughly this:
Languages aren't national; there can't be a language which is defined by a nation, or a nation defined by a language.
That goes doubly for racial / genetic groups: there are plenty of communities, e.g., in Jamaica, where families with no English ancestry have spoken English for generations.
English isn't really the languge of England anymore - it's obviously spoken as the majority language of a dozen big countries.
And Irish hasn't been just the language of Ireland for more than a millennium either, since it spread to Scotland; I tend to refer to it as Gaelic rather than Irish, as it was mutually intelligible with Scots Gaelic within living memory.
Gaelic (Irish and Scots Gaelic) and Manx are uncontroversially grouped together as the Goidelic languages; Welsh, Breton and various other languages which have sadly died out (e.g., Cornish) are part of a group called Brythonic.
But controversially, I don't think Goidelic and Brythonic constitute a single branch of Indo-European. They're two separate, closely related branches. Something along these lines is advanced by Prof James Clackson, if I recall correctly: that the notional Celtic branch lacks the shared innovations and so on that would point to the existence of an ancestral common tongue.
Even more controversially, I don't think the grouping of Goidelic and Brythonic should be called Celtic: this label was attributed to these languages pre-scientifically, but stuck. There's no particular glory or shame that attends upon linking these languages with a long-disappeared group of tribes, but there is no historical evidence to support it. It's a sort of invented tradition, founded on a mistake.
The idea of Indo-European languages separating neatly into subtrees of a greater tree is an old fashioned idea, from the time when there was more of a tendency to associate nations with languages. It was assumed that there once had been a single Indo-European language spoken by a community, among whom it was mutually intelligible. Then this language separated into a dozen or so daughter languages, such as Germanic, Romance, Indo-Aryan, Balto-Slavic, Greek, Armenian, Celtic and so on. Each of these was roughly assumed to have, at some point, been mutually unintelligible with each other, but to have represented a "branch" in the tree, in which, say, all the varieties and dialects that would one day be separate Germanic languages were nevertheless mutually intelligible.
We now understand that language change works a bit differently, though the branching-tree model is not fundamentally misleading at all in the case of Indo-European.
But there wasn't really a nation or tribe that existed as a single speech community ancestral to Irish and Breton and so on. They had diverged before that. And they likely had little to do with the people the Romans referred to as Celts.
There is enormous snobbery associated with differences in language. People insist that such-and-such a variety of language is a "dialect", or deny that two dialects are the same language, or insist that two mutually unintelligible languages are the same or whatever. These tend to be arguments about social status, rather than the practical question of who can communicate verbally with whom.
English is unusual in not having many close relative. Any more.
There are a couple of languages still spoken and written today that constitute English's nearest relations: Frisian, Afrikaans and Dutch. But in the past there were much more closely related forms of speech and writing that are no longer used: Scots, and Yola.
Scots we remember: it's the language of Robbie Burns, best remembered nowadays through the lyric poem "Auld Lang Syne", which we understand to be a weird old-fashioned and hard-to-understand form of *English* rather than a foreign tongue. For that is what Scots was: another form of English.
And Scots was not some bastardised low-status form of English, but the language of bishops and bureaucrats and businessmen. Actually, priests moreso than bishops, but that's a different story. There were low-status forms spoken by the poor, but the King's laws were written in Scots. This was a prestigious form of the language.
And it's the English language. Or maybe we should say that Scots and English were two standardised, prestige forms of the *same* language, for which we lack an appropriate name. In the end of course, England eclipsed Scotland in population and influence, and we know the common tongue by the name "English" as a result. But this is a situation that often occurs, called a "pluricentric language", where multiple power centres have their own slightly different versions of a mutually intelligible tongue.
The Goidelic languages have largely died out: we should not mince our words about this. But Irish Gaelic still exists, and is still learnt as a mother tongue in parts of Ireland. Nevertheless, the language is changing in ways that are characteristic of languages that aren't picking up enough new speakers, with the grammar and phonology simplifying.
Very large numbers of people learn Gaelic as a second language (indeed I briefly did in the short time I was at kindergarten in Ireland myself). And its use as a second language is increasing and improving. But it's not without its problems: it was a way of gatekeeping access to public sector employment in Ireland for decades, and became politicised, to the point where many Unionists have quite a dislike for it, as it's associated, rightly or wrongly, with Irish nationalism.
Ironically, as the Catholic Church held services in Latin until the 1960s, the main religious users of Irish Gaelic were more likely to be Protestant until that time.
Manx has died a death.