[1] It has been described by the historian Donnchadh Ó Corráin as "the first important bilingual Irish periodical".

[3] Its first editor was David Comyn, followed by John Fleming, Eoghan O'Growney and from November 1894 Eoin MacNeill.

The content spanned many genres; folktales, literary texts, poetry, historical studies, fiction and drama, as well as articles on topics both academic and controversial.

[4] In an article that appeared under the title "Our Position" in the third number of the Gaelic Journal in January 1883, the causes and agencies that made the Gaelic Journal a reality are mentioned, as (1) a growing taste among the reading portion of our people for things national, and a juster idea of the value of such things as we can still call our own; (2) the labours of devoted Irish scholars during the last fifty years—as O'Donovan, O'Curry, Davis, Petrie, Todd, Archbishop MacHale, Canon Bourke, S. H. O'Grady, John Fleming, Hennessy and Whitley Stokes—some of whom, happily, we have still amongst us; (3) the labours of continental scholars in the general field of Indo-European philology, and more particularly those of Pictet, Zeuss, Ebel, Gaidoz, de Jubainville, and others in the special field of Celtic philology; (4) the labours of learned bodies like the Royal Irish Academy, the Celtic Society, even those of the Irish Archaeological Society, but more especially those of the Ossianic Society; (5) the establishment of the "Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language;" and (6) above all the formation of the Gaelic Union, for no other society or body had ever thought or would ever think of so practical a means of cultivating the language—or indeed, of cultivating the living language at all.

The causes that had "operated against the rise of a vernacular Irish press" are described as "beyond the scope and province of this journal to discuss," before it is added that "but as they are obvious, there is all the less need to refer to them here".