In Celtic studies, scholars have debated the prevalence of secular learning in early Ireland, and stances on this matter vary widely. In 1910, Heinrich Zimmer offered up a theory for the pre-eminence of the Irish in classical learning based on the ‘direkte Handelsverbindungen’ (‘direct trading-connections’) between Ireland and Gallo-Roman Aquitaine. The wine trade with Gaul, Zimmer argued, provided the means for the exodus of throngs of scholars from western Gaul to Ireland in the period of migration. These traders brought with them late antique Christian learning, including the works of Ausonius of Bordeaux, Sulpicius Severus, and Martin of Tours.

Three years later, in a lecture given to the School of Irish Learning in September of 1912, Kuno Meyer argued that in a twelfth-century Leiden manuscript he found further evidence for late antique Gallic scholars fleeing to Ireland. Both Meyer and Zimmer believed this note to be of the sixth century and no later:

Zimmer and Meyer take ‘Hiberia’ to mean ‘Irish’ and ‘British’, and Meyer argues that in this twelfth-century account there is clear evidence of the arrival of Gallic scholars in Ireland by the fifth century. This thesis is proved, Meyer argues, in the earliest extant writings of Irish provenance, as St Patrick refers to ‘dominicati rhetorici’ (Confessio 238.23-24), those rhetoricians in comparison to whom he felt rustic and uneducated. And with Zimmer and Meyer a long debate ensued that would continue into the twenty-first century. Meyer's claims have been tempered to the extreme, but the case on classical learning in the fifth through the eighth centuries has not been closed.