NICE apartment. Nice view. Very, er, central. Everything you could want, really, only smaller. Yes, the walls do seem to press in on you a bit, and if you open the door, you halve your floor space, but what do you expect in the middle of town?

You could get a serious attack of claustrophobia if you thought about it for too long. So don't. Just get that CD the one with the woman wearing a red velvet cloak that would fill your kitchen snap it out of its cellophane wrapper, slip it into the machine. Turn off the light, lie down on your futon, head against the wall, bare feet pushing gently against the cool windowpane. Press "play".

You are listening to Enya's first album, The Celts. A church bell rings, and echoes slowly through a great hall. A woman's voice, distant yet strong, floats around a space that you conservatively estimate to be five, maybe six thou sand square feet. Now that's real music a sound that lets you believe you live somewhere bigger.

Exactly this type of music is selling large amounts right now and, for various reasons, it is doing so under the title "Celtic" music. Enya may have been among the earliest performers of this new genre, but she now has legions of followers, all ready to offer aural real estate at the comparatively modest price of

Now, however, with the selection of The Voice to be performed by Eimear Quinn, our representative at tomorrow's Eurovision song contest icy, "Celtic"music has finally become the official sound of Irish nation.

I do that myself sometimes just put on a record and close my eyes and drift away," says Brendan Graham, composer of The Voice, his own voice travelling down a mobile phone from Oslo. "There are, things you can listen to and you re on a wave and it's like being in a flotation tank. But I also think there is music that is in that area that has something to say lyrically as well something that would engage people, and I would hope that The Voice would fall into the latter category."

Of all the forced separations, to sever a Eurovision song lyric, first from the up link glamour of the contest, and then even from its melody, is probably the most unfair. But here, in the words of Graham's The Voice, is the key to "Celtic" music, or as he occasionally refers to it, the music of "The New Tradition"

I hear your voice on the wind/ And I hear you call out my name/ Listen my child you say to me I am The Voice of your history/ Be not afraid come follow me/ Answer my call and I'll set you free."

Although it would be more typical if the lyric were not fore grounded in this manner, this is, nevertheless, text book "Celtic" songwriting. The singer's "voice" is explicitly linked to something elemental, a force of nature, in this case the sound of the wind. This elemental sound is in turn linked to the pasta not, however to any historical but to a heritage of unspecified freedom.

"I could see how songs with a certain lyrical content are labelled `Celtic'," says Graham. "Calling something `Celtic' has much more to do with subject matter than with music, but if you have a particular subject matter, then a certain sort of music follows. There has to be a compatibility between the lyric and the music."

Oddly, although subject matter has always been central in the brief history of "Celtic" music, the communication of this is often performed far more clearly in the pack aging of the music than in the music itself. Enya's first album, for example, (significantly a soundtrack album) comes complete with a booklet explaining the myths and stories to which the music refers. Maire Breatnach's just released album, Celtic Lovers, which arrives nearly 10 years into the "Celtic" music boom, still seems to anticipate some scepticism. Its packaging includes a list of reference books of Celtic mythology.

A desire to include a bibliography in your sleeve notes ought to be one of the seven warning signs that your album is becoming a little top heavy, and that music is in danger of being swamped. But Celtic Lovers goes one step further, adding the note that "the design of the album acquired an added significance for me in that, besides specifically portraying aspects of the story of Derdriu and Naois . . the elements in the picture also relate to Jungian psychology ... "When you buy a "Celtic" album, you don't just buy 12 tunes, you buy a world view.

But while the myths used to enhance the "Celtic" identity of the music may have deep roots in the European psychoanalytical tradition, how much of the music that is called "Celtic" actually has Celtic roots? Tommy Munnelly, who is a folklore collector with the Department of Folklore in UCD, and first chairman of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, sees the word as bearing little relevance to much of the music that is marketed under the term.

"To use the term `Celtic' in relation to the music of Enya and Clannad is totally inappropriate," says Munnelly. "It is just a transference into this age of the essentially Victorian Romantic idea of the Druidic times. It has very little basis in fact. It is a fashionable term rather than one with any historical background whatsoever."

ALTHOUGH there is little data available about the music of the Celts, there is still little reason to assume that it would have sounded much like Orinoco Flow, particularly given the dearth of digital technology in ancient Ireland. "We have no idea what Celtic music sounded like," says Munnelly. "We have some idea what instruments they played, the bronze horns and things like that, but outside of the old Suantrai, Goltrai and Geantrai, it is impossible to figure out what they played at all."

While musicologists such as Thomas Munnelly are at a loss to say what might be Celtic about the sounds of Clannad, Enya and the rest (other than the occasional use of the Irish language) shrewd marketers of Irish music on the international scene have been careful to associate the word "Celtic" rather than "Irish" with their product.

All of this might come as a surprise to anyone who bought a record on the Paul McGuinness and Dave Kavanagh inspired label, Celtic Heartbeat. A compilation album released by the company, featuring music by Anuna, Moving Hearts, Frances Black and Clannad has a sleeve note asserting that "Celtic Heartbeat is an Irish label established specifically to bring you the very best in authentic Celtic music".

"When we were doing research before we set up Celtic Heartbeat we found that the stores were swamped with second class albums of `Celtic' music," says Barbara Galavan, managing director of Celtic Heartbeat. "This music had nothing to do with Ireland and was just cashing in on the popularity of people like Clannad and Enya, who had broken Irish music out of the small time, selling millions rather than thou sands. We release music that comes from Ireland."

There were Celts in various parts of Europe from 700 BC but when the Celtic Heartbeat lion describes its content as "authentic Celtic music", it does not mean to suggest that these are the sounds of the Celts, says Galavan. "What we mean by authentic Celtic music is that it is in Ireland, rather than the imitation Celtic music that you come across."

It would be easy to pick holes in the way Celtic Heartbeat positions its product, to suggest that it is conforming to foreign expectations of Ireland by making a largely bogus and politically suspect claim of ethnic homogeneity, but that seems very much beside the point. The type of language used by the label is deployed to project an image of a product, and not a sociological record of cultural diversity. Nevertheless, since "Celtic" music is itself a recent, artificial construct, a Norwegian version of this fantasy, for example, could hardly be said to have less legitimacy than an Irish one both are, after all, works of imagination.

Barra O'Cinneide, who is Professor of Marketing at the University of Limerick, and has recently been studying "the Riverdance furore" would seem to agree with Brendan Graham that "Celtic" music is about a set of images rather than a sound. "I think `Celtic' is a far more romantic and poetic word than `Irish', and more self explanatory than if they were branded as `Gaelic', because people outside would not necessarily understand what that meant," says O'Cinneide. "They could assume that it meant songs in the Irish language. I think also there is mysticism about the Celtic imagery, where it is kind of Yeatsian, rather than Irish imagery."

What "Celtic" offers is a shorthand for the great escape, a fast track back to some imagined past of wholeness, and authenticity. This, of course, is exactly what Coca Cola offers. It is no surprise, then, when Celtic music turns up in the movie and advertising business. Clannad's success in the US followed in the wake of the Harry's Game soundtrack music being used by Volkswagen for an American TV advertisement, and Enya was introduced to the mass market by way of the soundtrack album to a historical romance.

"It's like anything," says Brendan Graham, "you have to brand it. It's like Guinness is a brand name. Guinness is porter, but they have successfully managed to brand a particular type of porter. Similarly `Celtic' is a very successful marketing brand. The only problem is that now when I go into a record shop there are so many `Celtic' products, Celtic Vision, Celtic Odyssey, even Celtic Pan Pipes, that there is a danger of overloading the marketplace with the `Celtic' brand. It's like anything, if you overuse the term, then it can very quickly become a term of abuse.