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Prosthetic F, Backformation or 'Feagal vs Eagal'

Prosthetic sounds are nothing unusual in the … oh … a prosthetic sound is a "random" sound that gets stuck in front, the middle or at the end of a word to make it conform better with the sound rules of whichever language.

Many languages do this, e.g. Spanish.  Spanish phonology (sound laws) has a rule saying that no word may begin with [sp] [st] or [sk].  But there are words in Spanish which either historically have these initials … or loan words coming into Spanish.  To get around this problem, Spanish phonology says "prefix [e]" … so Latin spīritus, scola, stabilis become espirito, escuela and estable.  Similarly Scandinavia, spot and Stockholm become Escandinavia, espot and Estocolmo …

Backformation means that speakers of a langues take a native or adopted word and re-analyse it as it were.  This often happens in loanwords or native words whose meaning has become opaque.  English for example adopted the French word for cherries, cerise from Latin ceresia, both mass nouns.  But because English has a very prominent -s plural, English speakers "figured" that the s must obviously be a plural, so if many of those little fruits are 'cherries', one must obviously be - a cherry.  This is called backformation.  Gaelic does that too, but because it has this phenomenon of lenition at the beginning of words, unlike English it tends to do that at the beginning of words ...

Now, Gaelic phonology does not forbid words beginning with a vowel (don't laugh, some languages have no words beginning with vowels!) but it does have prosthetic sounds.  Most notably [f].  In the case of Gaelic this comes about when native speakers re-interpret words beginning with a vowel as "a word which has lenited X".  There is more than just one backformations however.  Let us have a quick look at what can happen:

  1. [h] > t   because lenited t yields [h]

  2. ø > f   because lenited f is silent (this is by far the most common one and about the only one still active in modern Gaelic)

  3. ø > t or g, d   this happens in words with a soft onset i.e. an almost [j] sound e.g. in Engl. iota, which to Gaelic ears sounds like the word begins with gh th or dh

Examples to your hearts content, a lot of them are loanwords (except the ones beginning with f + vowel):

  Gaelic Irish
Engl. halberd taileabart halbard
Engl. hogshead tocasaid oigiséid
Engl. throng trang 'busy' trang(láil)
Lat. iota 'a bit' tiota giota
Norse hǫll 'hall' talla halla
OIr. áinne 'ring' fàinne fáinne
OIr. allas 'sweat' fallas allas
OIr. ásaim 'I grow' fàs fás
OIr. ecla 'fear' (f)eagal eagla
OIr. ilur 'eagle' (f)iolaire iolar
OIr. osclaicim 'I open' fosgail oscail
OIr. rádharc 'vision, view' fradharc radharc
OIr. uacht 'cold' fuachd fuacht
OIr. uath 'hate' fuath fuath
OIr. urusa 'easy' furasda furasta
Scots haggis taigeis hagaois

A particularly bizarre example of this is the Gaelic word for sister ... because it went through this several times:

Indo-European swesðr
Old Irish siur which lenites to shiur so often (think about it ... mo, do and a (his) all lenite, and you talk about this sort of relationship so much more than you do about 'our sister') it becomes re-analysed as   
Early Irish fiur/siur (genitive fethar/sethar) which yields modern
Irish

and Scottish Gaelic

 deirfiúr 'sister' from dearbh phiuthar 'true sister' and fiúr 'kinswoman' (because two words are better than one …)
piuthar - from the old genititve which has now become the nominative for sister and <p> because <f> is obviously lenited <p> … now why didn't you think of that before? ☺

Anyway, to get back to the point ... this is the reason why you will hear some Gaelic speakers pronounce certain words with f and some without ... it is a process that is still in the middle of happening, so until the language decides on whether it will stick with eagal or adopt feagal, you can take your pick about which one you prefer, it really makes no difference either way as both are "good Gaelic words".