I

Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire does not exist—town without laughter—but almost any town in Ireland could be called Bailegangaeilge—town without Irish—except that it would be known instead as Ballygongwailga. It surprises and disappoints this writer that the Irish people consent to live in a land of makey-uppy placenames. The worst recent example that your correspondent has come across is Lissywollen, actually a fairly faithful rendering of the pronunciation of Lios Uí Mhulláin, but without meaning anything in Irish, English or any other language. Tim Robinson, great cartographer and capturer of the West of Ireland, writes—by way of Georges Perec—of Muckanaghederdauhaulia, describing the despicable hilarity of the members of the Dáil when the location came up once in Debate. The place regrettably known by this name in English is in fact Muiceanach Idir Dhá Sháile, the pig-like hill (“hog-backed hill” as Robinson nicely puts it) between two bodies of salt water (“two arms of the sea”). Robinson’s conclusion: “Thus the placename is a thumbnail sketch of the topography”: the people are living in a land that is legible, to which they are connected by the name once given, and now inherited; connected not only to the landscape, but to those who have carried the name in speech and in writing; connected to themselves, to their future selves, the future other selves who will inherit and comprehend the words they receive. 

Plainly the lack of such a connection is the result of a Colonial project intended to separate the people from their Land. It would have been an extraordinary act of creativity, as well as violence, for the English Administration to have granted completely new names to every townland, not to mention every feature of the landscape: the rocks, wells, boreens that Robinson describes in his extraordinary work. This they did not attempt. Instead, following the Jacobite uprising in 1745, the London Government decided to map the artillery (or survey the ordnance) of the Highland Scots. This task expanded, and covered other parts of Britain before moving to Ireland in the 1820s; the Ordnance Survey of Ireland took more than twenty years to complete. 

II

One can find tributes to the learning of the OS men elsewhere; this is not Macdara’s emphasis. It is clear that a range of approaches were taken. In some cases a place was partly translated: Booterstown instead of Roadtown or something approximating Baile an Bhóthair, like Ballyboher or Ballybooter. In other cases a colonial name was given an Irish translation; Macdara once had cause to visit Swinford, rendered in Irish as Béal Átha na Muice (pigs again, referring to actual pigs this time), but founded by colonists with its English-language name. There are also cases where a place only has an Irish name—Dún Laoghaire, Port Laoise—but the people have learnt to imitate the otherwise universal practice of turning it into babble congruent with English language pronunciation: Dun Leery, Port Leesh.

This is all the more disappointing when the Gaelic poets were extraordinarily, even tediously, attentive to the meaning of placenames. Aside from the dindsenchas, poetry specifically recounting the origins of placenames, one can read explanations of the names of particular sites in the Táin, Buile Shuibhne, et cetera, often in passages that seem to have been included specifically to explain how a location came to have a name attached to it. From this we might guess that the words of the poet must have seemed the greater in importance, to poet and audience, in tying the events recounted to real life places, places that were known to listeners, or knowable at least.

III

Then there is the ongoing comedy of the settler supremacists in the north-east of the country boasting of their disdain for Irish culture, including our language; querying why the mock administration of the Occupied Territories should show any regard for a completely and utterly foreign and alien tongue, all while living in a landscape saturated with meaning in Irish, including, for example the names of each of the six counties, the principal city of the statelet—but why carry on, the point is clear in every townland, every river and stream, every bay. The settlers are mouthing Irish stupidly each time they name the places they occupy: how do they imagine these places acquired these names, and can they say what a single name means? Part of the current phase of the ongoing settler war on Ireland is an attempt to prevent bilingual street signs, successfully ensuring that, as of February 2023 (when the English Broadcasting Corporation had a small report on the matter), equal signage had been approved by Belfast City Council for one single street, despite applications having been made for hundreds. 

Regrettably, Macdara has witnessed an Irish person accidentally saying Derry in front of an English person, then gallantly correcting themselves to say Londonderry, not realising that no English person would understand what had just transpired. Here we see the most mindless colonial practice imaginable: the requirement to say the name of the imperial capital in front of a city whose name means an oak grove, marking it out as a most sacred site to the Gaels (recall that the very name of the druids or draoithe refers to their connection to oaks). 

IV

Macdara will end by noting that the alienating effect of living in a landscape of nonsense is exacerbated by the extraordinary names given to housing estates and apartment buildings, names that would embarrass an Ohio realtor chatting to her nail technician—recent additions that Macdara has seen include Chesterfield, Old Meadow, Alta Verde—a set that extends from banal (at the better end) thorough to grotesquely inappropriate, pretentious and confusing. The developers of these sites are clearing the land of its features and its connections to divines, heroes, figures from tragedy and myth; they leave flattened ground for building upon, an untroubled space for those who want to live Nowhere, that is to say in an apartment that could be in any mid-sized, Midwestern US town. Those responsible for these new and vulgar names are smoothing over the roughness of our specificity, the better to integrate us into Late Capitalism; do not imagine that they are harmless in their inanity: these aggressively bland names are intended to complete the erasure of our Nationality begun under conditions of Imperialism.

Robinson writes of the Echosphere, “the zone in which a balance is maintained between culture and the wild, so that, through daily frequentation and the communal memory of placelore, nature answers to the human voice”. Macdara suggests that this does not apply only in wild places. Placelore can be maintained and celebrated in our settlements too. But the Irish people call out words that are not names, that cannot echo.