Irish placenames: post-colonial locations

Catherine Nash

The names of places speak of complicated cultural geographies of language and

location. Placename changes have often been explored as examples of power-laden
contests over the meaning of places and collective identities. Yet projects to research,
preserve and reinstate Gaelic placenames in contemporary Ireland (both North and
South) raise more complex questions of cultural identity, authenticity and diversity.
These questions are central to post-colonial cultural politics. By combining ideas of
pluralism, multiplicity and diversity with those of authenticity, belonging and truth,
these contemporary placename projects represent efforts to reimagine concepts of
identity, cultural location and tradition. They suggest ways to negotiate the
theoretical contradictions between and practical politics of critiques of colonial
cultural suppression and celebrations of cultural retrieval.

key words Ireland placenames post-colonialism culture identity politics

Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
email: c.nash@rhbnc.ac.uk

revised manuscript received 7 May 1999

Polarization simplifies both sides until it is useless- Ordinance survey didn't anglicise- Most place
names
had already been changed - Danger of polarities
Introduction: Irish names for places Tensions over the meanings and identities evoked in
Placenames such names still persist in the infamous case of
Linking language and geography, placenames, at Derry/Londonderry, or in the varied designations
once both material and metaphorical, substantive for the two political entities on the island (with their
and symbolic – read, spoken, mapped, catalogued degrees of nationalist and unionist resonance): the
and written in the everyday intimate and official North, Ulster, Northern Ireland, the Six Counties,
bureaucratic geographies of road signs, streetnames and the Republic, Éire, the Free State, the South,
and addresses – are all about questions of power, Southern Ireland, the Twenty-Six Counties. More
culture, location and identity. As modern Western widely, the thousands of bilingual placenames in
states throughout the nineteenth century consoli- streetnames and road signs in Southern Ireland,
dated their authority and eased their governance erected as new maps and lists of the original Gaelic
through archives and registers of people, places and placenames were produced over the twentieth cen-
things, places were mapped, censuses taken and tury, could be read as memorials to the erosion of
lists compiled. In Ireland, this process of moderniz- one language and culture by another. Similarly, the
ation was profoundly complicated by a colonial recent erection of Gaelic street signs in Catholic West
relation, the rapid decline of the Irish language, Belfast might be interpreted as the literal inscription
partition of the island and Southern independence. of cultural and political difference onto the city.
Over the last two centuries, government bodies But instead of simply repeating a story of colonial
Names
have systematically named and renamed places in erasure and post-colonial retrieval, or of sectarian
change Ireland. The most notorious episode in this long
territoriality and cultural antagonism, contempor-
history of toponymic change in Ireland was the ary discourses surrounding placenames in Ireland
mid-nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey project to complicate the ways in which the cultural politics of
map Ireland and officially validate versions of Irish place can be understood.
placenames that had been modified to various This paper considers policy, research projects
degrees to suit English speech and orthography. and protest movements to do with placenames in

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 24 457–480 1999

ISSN 0020-2754 © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 1999
 Placenames in contemporary Ireland
458
contemporary Ireland. The history of place-
Explore naming in Ireland and post-colonial approaches to
language and culture, which I first explore through
placenames
the play Translations by Brian Friel and the
through
placename poetry of Seamus Heaney, frame my
Lit. discussion of contemporary placename projects
and their cultural politics. Through their writing
and work in the Field Day Theatre collective
(Regan 1992; Richards 1991), both Friel and
Heaney were part of a broader cultural exploration
of questions of identity in Ireland since the 1970s,
prompted by the inadequacies of romantic and
exclusive versions of Irishness in the face of armed
conflict in Northern Ireland and the modernization
and secularization of Irish society. Rather than
provide a wholly new, comprehensive or definitive
reading of their work, I am using it here to ground
more abstract debates about Irish cultural identity
Explore and post-colonial perspectives and their geo-
placenamegraphical dimensions. These issues are then
s explored further in recent social movements that
through research and conserve Irish placenames and in
social government placename policies in Northern
movementsIreland and the Republic. It is these projects, their
cultural politics and their implications for broader
approaches to the relationships between culture,
place and identity that are the central issue here.
Though mapping and naming are clearly inter-
twined, my concern is less with the critical and
creative turn to cartography as a specific form of
representation within geography and the arts, and
more with the disputed cultural politics of these
historical and contemporary toponymic geogra-
phies. The understandings of history, culture and
identity condensed in the discourses surrounding
past and present placename changes are insepar-
able from broader questions of Irish history and
identity.
The last twenty years have seen sustained cul-
tural, political and academic efforts to complicate
understandings of Irish identity, history and cul-
ture, in response to the violent effects of simple,
polarized and sectarian versions of each. Yet, inter-
pretations of this story of topographic naming and
renaming often return to the drama of anti-colonial
models of Irish history, which set the purity of
pre-colonial culture against the corruption of the
colonial influence. Concepts of located identity,
history and culture in Ireland are being rearticu-
lated and creatively reimagined in policies,
research projects, campaigns and cultural products
surrounding placenames. These discourses of
Catherine Nash
identity, as much as post-colonial theories of
language and culture, challenge the simple narra-
tive of purity, erasure and recovery and at the same
time retain a sense of the costs of both colonial
and national versions of Ireland. The insights
such projects offer can inform understandings of
post-colonial cultural politics more widely.
The cultural politics of placenames in Ireland
also has its own geography. Different regional
political geographies, as well as the specific urban,
suburban and rural contexts, lead to different kinds
of cultural politics. In Northern Ireland, those seek-
ing to preserve Gaelic placenames are faced with
both the traditional republican associations of the
language and the danger that their efforts are read
as validating a specifically Gaelic, rather than
mixed, heritage for the region. In the West of
Ireland, placename conservation projects could be
criticized for supporting a romantic version of
Irishness located in the least-Anglicized West, an
imaginative geography that was so central to Irish
nationalism and that has been so thoroughly
deconstructed in Irish identity politics over the last
twenty years (Gibbons 1996, 23–36). Yet the politics
of placename research in this context is also
informed by the continued existence there of a
minority Irish-speaking community whose inter-
ests may not match the perspectives of metropoli-
tan cultural critics. Disputes about the naming of
suburban housing developments involve tensions
between local interests and meanings and the
globalizing impulses towards a international
Anglophone language of naming detached from
any local significance. My aim here is to locate
these placename geographies within a broader
context of contemporary post-colonial politics and
to trace in their complexities, subtleties, contra-
dictions and accommodations, their potential to
challenge the simple historical narrative and easy
politics of the paradigm of colonial naming and
post-independence renaming.
My argument in this paper involves considering
two widely held critical perspectives on culture,
politics and identity. The first is the broadly
accepted critique of the colonial destruction,
erosion, devaluation and delegitimation of
colonized cultures that accompanied political sub-
ordination. The imposition of placenames and
language itself over indigenous languages and
placenames is just one example. The second, alert
to the dangers of ideas of cultural purity evident in
racism and ethnic fundamentalism, involves the
 Difference between perspectives
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
critique of ideas of returning to supposedly pure
pre-colonial cultures. While the first perspective
implies that efforts to restore placenames to earlier
forms can be celebrated as practices of cultural
resistance, retrieval and recovery, the second sug-
gests that these efforts should be dismissed as
misguided and impossible attempts to return to a
primordial pre-colonial culture. Drawing on post-
colonial theory, my argument here is that this
apparently polarized choice between an anti-
colonial-inspired celebration of cultural revival and
a critical dismissal of ideas of truth and authen-
author ticity cannot adequately engage with the com-
rejects plexity of contemporary cultural politics. The ways
both in which ideas of location, culture and identity are
perspe- worked through these placename discourses com-
ctives plicate some of the neatness of cultural theories
that offer the option of either espousing ideas of
cultural essences or deconstructing notions of cul-
tural authenticity and belonging. Before concen-
trating on these recent projects, I first want to
frame them with a consideration of questions
of cultural erosion and cultural recovery within
post-colonialism.
Authors post-colonialism definition
Post-colonial perspectives on cultural
erosion and cultural origins
Within geography and the humanities, post-
colonial theories are increasingly influential critical
perspectives on the practice, ideologies and
legacies of colonialism (Adam and Tiffin 1990;
Ashcroft et al 1989; 1995; Chambers and Curti
1996). Rather than use the term to designate a time
after colonialism, I am using it as a broad label for
a set of perspectives formulated in theory and
cultural practice, which, while variously informed
by feminism, post-structuralism, Marxism and
anti-racism, share a critical focus on colonialism
and its legacies. Arising out of a critique of the
ideologies and practices of colonialism, post-
colonialism in its most recent forms works through
the strategy of maintaining a critical perspective on
relations of power, while at the same time challeng-
ing the binary categories of homogenous coloniz-
ing and colonized groups and the reproduction of
these polarities in the decolonized nation state.
Research providing a greater sense of complex
interplay of class, gender, sexuality and racialized
forms of power has exposed the inadequacies
of simple models of power, culture or identity.
post-colonial criticism 459
Nevertheless, post-colonialism has also been
criticized for its use as a generalizing term that
collapses the differences between colonial experi-
ences; for implying a temporal break that elides
continued neocolonial processes and internal
oppressions; for justifying a return to the texts of
the colonizers, even if this rereading of the canon is
critical; and for seeming to treat former colonies as
sources of raw materials for Western theoretical
processing (Docker 1995; Hall S 1996; McClintock
1992; Parry 1987). While geographers have been
especially attentive to the spatial imaginations of
colonialism, and have deconstructed the model of
metropolitan core and primitive periphery (Jacobs
1996), the implications, nature and applicability of
post-colonial theories also have their own geogra-
phy and are shaped by the specific historical
experiences of colonization, imperialism, settle-
ment and political independence in different
places.
To consider Irish cultural politics in the past and
present through post-colonial perspectives is
neither straightforward nor uncontentious (Bell
1991; Graham 1994; Kennedy 1992; Livesey and
Murray 1997; Lloyd 1993). As Luke Gibbons (1996)
has argued, the historical experience of Ireland as
an imagined place of pre-modern primitivism
both reviled as uncivilized and romantically
celebrated within metropolitan Europe, and as an
Anglophone and white colony within Europe,
complicates the standard pattern of colonial
and post-colonial histories and geographies of
European powers and overseas territories. Though
Why
contemporary post-colonial theory is increasingly
Not?
pointing to the post-colonial condition of Britain,
whose culture and character have been deeply
shaped by colonialism (Hall C 1996), Ireland
clearly does not follow this model of a Western
country shaped by its past empire, despite its
involvement in imperialism in India, or the place of
white Irish migrants in the politics of race in the
United States. Yet it is precisely these kinds
of complexities (raised by thinking about the
colonized and colonizing history of Ireland) that
post-colonialism should address. Despite the dif-
ferent positions and perspectives within what
is broadly called post-colonialism, the work of
colonial discourse theorists and post-colonial
critics provides an agenda, schematically sum-
marized as follows: for addressing the complexity
of colonial relations as well as their broad
structures; for critically considering cultures of
460
domination, resistance and hybridity; and for
exploring the ethnic, classed and gendered differ-
ences of privilege and power within the colonizing,
colonized and, importantly, post-independence
state. This kind of post-colonial approach can
bypass the choice posed by the most crude
positions within the Irish revisionist debate of
either focusing exclusively on, or de-emphasizing,
colonialism in Irish history.
Since the early modern period, for example,
Ireland functioned as a colonial testing ground for
plantation and control (Andrews et al 1979; Canny
1988). Yet Irish people were also involved as
soldiers, settlers, missionaries, reformers and
statesmen in the British imperial project (Cook
1993; Jeffery 1996; Kapur 1997). Though the
Elizabethan conquest of Ireland was clearly con-
ceived and experienced as a colonial project
(Canny 1976), a simple anti-colonial interpretative
framework would characterize all settlers and their
descendants after some indeterminate distant time
as alien anomalies in a line of Gaelic history, with
no claim to inclusion in the narratives of the nation,
except as invaders. If post-colonialism is simply
a critique of the violence done to the colonized
by the colonizer, then post-colonialism would
be rightly criticized for supporting nationalist
ideologies as the natural outcome of anti-
colonialism (Graham 1994), and for eternally
assigning all those outside the idealized rural,
Catholic, Gaelic nation – such as Northern
Protestants – to the category of colonizers, colonial
collaborators or puppets (Shirlow and McGovern
1997, 4). While David Miller (1998) and Pamela
Clayton (1998) have recently importantly argued,
respectively, for maintaining a colonial framework
in understanding the ‘troubles’, and for a recog-
nition of the persistence of colonial settler
ideologies in contemporary Northern Ireland,
neither offer suggestions about how to break down
the divisive legacies of colonialism, nor reformu-
late ideas of belonging in ways that would release
‘planter stock’ from an, albeit privileged, category
of alien people. In the context of attempts to
undermine the polarized versions of history and
identity in Northern Ireland, this simple binary of
colonized and colonizer is deeply problematic.
Contemporary post-colonial theory can challenge
this dualism while maintaining a critical perspec-
tive on the oppressions of both colonial and
nationalist formations. The case of Ireland clearly
indicates a need for a more differentiated sense of
Catherine Nash
the post-colonial. Nevertheless, despite the ways in
which post-colonialism has been criticized, the
exploration of language and location within post-
colonial theories and creative practice is productive
here in considering their intersection in place-
names and geographies of identity. Though both
the critique of colonial cultural violence and the
critique of anti-colonial (often national) discourses
of cultural purity can be encompassed within a
broadly post-colonial perspective, the implications
and tensions of this double critique need to be
addressed systematically rather than overlooked.
By considering, through a focus on placenames,
firstly the critique of colonial cultural sub-
ordination, and secondly the arguments against
ideas of return to origins, the critical purchase and
problems of these perspectives can be explored.
Colonial naming
Giving places new names as part of processes of
capitalist modernization (Pred 1990; 1992), colonial
settlement (Carter 1987), state formation (Cohen
and Kliot 1992), national independence (Yeoh 1996)
or official commemoration (Azaryahu 1996) vividly
illustrates the power of labelling, defining and
representing places and people. Resistance to these
changes similarly speaks of the contested meaning
of places. Replacing one set of names by another –
indigenous names with colonial names, or colonial
names with new national names, for example –
inscribes discourses and counterdiscourses of
power and identity onto topography. European
colonial impulses to name and simultaneously
claim newly ‘discovered’ or explored land, and the
systematic mapping and naming of territory in
white settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand,
Australia, the United States or Latin America are
well known (Carter 1987; Mundy 1996). In light
of the paramount significance of language as a
marker of collective identity, these naming
processes have been read as practices of cultural
erasure in which the newly named and mapped
places were appropriated as the indigenous
cultures were subordinated (Brealey 1995). New
names, it is argued, ruptured the relationships
between collective indigenous history, culture,
identity and location condensed in native place-
names. This sense of disjuncture between the
placename and local knowledge was especially
heightened, as Barbara Mundy has discussed in
relation to Spanish sixteenth-century mapping of
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
New Spain, when imperialist practices of renaming
replaced native logographic pictorial placenames
with alphabetic forms whose meanings were
inaccessible to native people. The resulting
maps, she argues, ‘tell us a tale of language
and loss’ (Mundy 1996, 179). In colonial contexts,
indigenous names survived to varied degrees.
They were partially incorporated into the new
colonial toponymies or remained as alternative
unofficial cultural geographies. As Harley (1992a,
530–31) has argued, the presence of some native
toponyms in colonial maps shows a dialogue
between colonizer and colonized that was highly
unequal. The significance of colonial linguistic and
toponymic policies has been framed, at least in
part, by the way language has featured within
discourses of nationhood.
Conventionally, the existence of a shared
language has been one of the fundamental criteria
for nationhood and the project of building a nation
state in which territory and collective culture
coincide. Placenames thus combine the two
elements – land and language – that have been
central to the cultural projects of romantic
nationalism, not least in late nineteenth-century
Irish cultural nationalism in which land and
language were twinned in an imaginative, political
and economic geography of rural life and native
landownership. The Gaelic language and the soil of
Ireland were, it was argued, deep repositories of
the native spirit. To lose the Gaelic language would
be to lose the soul of the nation and, crucially, the
‘natural’ connection to the land that could only be
experienced and articulated through the native
tongue. It is this sense of the profound damage of
colonial cultural subordination that has informed
the sustained critique over the last two decades of
English colonial mapping and naming in Ireland.
Yet even before the nineteenth century, early
modern English interventions in the toponymy of
Ireland were clearly part of the project of extending
English authority in Ireland through plantation,
military control and cultural repression. The terms
of a seventeenth-century royal edict extended to
placenames the restrictions imposed on language,
dress, customs and lifestyle, in order both to secure
the political authority and to preserve the cultural
identity of the New English settlers against the
cultural and material threat of the ‘native Irish’.
His majestie taking notice of the barbarous and
uncouth names, by which most of the towns and places
in this Kingdom of Ireland are called, which hath
461
occasioned much damage to diverse of his good sub-
jects, and are very troublesome in the use thereof, and
much retards the reformation of that Kingdom, for
remedy thereof is pleased that it is enacted, and be
it enacted by the authority aforesaid that the lord
lieutenant and council shall and may advise of, settle,
and direct in the passing of all letters patent in that
kingdom for the future, how new and proper names
more suitable to the English tongue may be inserted.
(quoted in Ormeling 1983, 61)
Placenames here were clearly part of a larger
process of colonial cultural and political sub-
ordination. The most patent example of the ways in
which British authority was inscribed in the land
through naming was the use of the Royal names of
Kingstown for Dún Laoghaire, Queenstown for
Cóbh, King’s County for Offaly and Queen’s
County for Laois. Their existence on maps of
Ireland up until the early twentieth century was a
legacy and reminder of Elizabethan expansion and
Tudor plantation. Yet, despite its symbolic power,
the policy was relatively ineffectual. Gaelic names
continued to be used by the native Irish and while
English-speaking settlers introduced new names,
they continued to use partially Anglicized forms of
Irish placenames on their newly acquired land
(Muhr 1992a). Now most critical attention is paid
to the nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland.
Paralleling the geographical critique of cartogra-
phy (Harley 1988; 1992b), Mary Hamer (1989a;
1989b), for example, locates the decision to map
Ireland in the political context following the act
of Union of 1801 that dissolved the Protestant
parliament in Dublin and returned authority over
Ireland to Westminster. Along with the nineteenth-
century pursuits of ethnology and philology,
she argues, standardizing the measurement and
placenames of Ireland through cartographic survey
could make Ireland knowable and governable and
so secure the authority of the predominately
Protestant English landowners and of British
territorial claims over Ireland. She argues:
Masquerading as a process of systematic record, the
mapping of Ireland was a prolonged act of cultural
displacement and textual processing, in which ancient
place-names and boundaries were incorporated and
reinscribed. (Hamer 1989a, 190)
The most contentious aspect of the project was the
way in which placenames were Anglicized,
replaced by English alternatives or simply mis-
recorded as the field notebooks of the Ordnance
462
Survey officers were filled with names transcribed
from local knowledgeable individuals (Andrews
1975).
National renaming
The new lists and maps of Gaelic names that began
to be produced in the first decades of the twentieth
century, as Irish cultural nationalists appropriated
the technologies of state and empire to resist these
Anglicized names, constitute a post-imperial
archive or ‘countermapping’ project. Prior to inde-
pendence, the Gaelic League published two lists of
the Gaelic versions of Anglicized names, in 1905
and 1911 (Laoide 1905; 1911), as part of its work to
save the Irish language, which had been under-
mined by the Famine, colonial educational policy
and the economic and practical imperative of using
English in a colony organized through the English
language and in the predominantly Anglophone
destinations of Irish migrants. Its founder, Douglas
Hyde, in his call for the de-Anglicization of the
Irish nation in 1892, turned to the question of
placenames, claiming that:
On the whole, our place names have been treated with
about the same respect as if they were the names of a
savage tribe which had never before been reduced to
writing, and with about the same intelligence and
contempt as vulgar English squatters treat the topo-
graphical nomenclature of the Red Indians . . . I hope
and trust that where it may be done without any great
inconvenience a native Irish Government will be
induced to provide for the restoration of our place
names on something like a rational basis. (quoted in
Ó Conaire 1986, 166–7)
Following the formation of the Free State in 1922
and the creation of Northern Ireland with Partition,
the work of the Gaelic League was followed by
official post office toponymic guides in Southern
Ireland (Oifig an Phuist 1937; 1969). Even before
independence, the introduction of local govern-
ment to Ireland in 1898 had allowed some urban
local authorities to introduce placename policies in
sympathy with Irish cultural nationalism. The
Dublin Corporation, faced with ‘24 names of kings,
queens and their families, 56 Lord Lieutenants,
96 nobles and other owners of property, various
officials and celebrated persons’ (Mac Mathúna
1992, 63), erected bilingual street nameplates in the
1900s, and the names Offaly, Port Laois and Dún
Laoghaire were in use before they were officially
sanctioned by the Free State (Ó Maolfabhail
1992, 18). In 1946, a placenames commission, An
Catherine Nash
Coimisiún Logainmneacha, was established by the
Dublin government to advise on:
i. the investigation of the placenames of Ireland; ii.
research in order to determine the correct original Irish
forms of those names in so far as they can be estab-
lished, and iii. the preparation of lists of those names, in
their Irish forms, for publication and for official use.
(Ó Maolfabhail 1992, 138)
A Placenames Branch was established by the
Ordnance Survey of Ireland in 1955, again to
research and establish the correct Irish forms of
geographical names. Though the first bilingual
road signs in Southern Ireland had been erected by
the Automobile Association in 1937, the state
assumed responsibility for road signs soon after
and in 1952 it was decreed that all placenames
‘shall be shown in Roman letters in Irish and
English’. In contrast, in Northern Ireland, in keep-
ing with Unionist government’s antipathy towards
the Irish language (Andrews L 1997), the erection
of bilingual signs was officially banned in 1947 was
still legally prohibited until 1995 (O’Reilly 1998).
The political purchase of an anti-colonial read-
ing of this history of naming is clear, highlighting
as it does the collective cultural injustice of
language loss, cartographic misrepresentation and,
as one author put it, toponymic ‘degradation’ (‘An
Irish C C’ 1919). It is frequently argued that
nineteenth-century colonial mapping masked and
marginalized the local mythological, folkloric and
historical meanings of landscape that stretched
back to the ninth- and tenth-century dindsenchas
tradition of Irish topographic poetry (Hannan
1991; Sheenan 1988). The associations of the ‘living
landscape’ in Ireland are, it is argued, to do with
names and their local, mythological and social
narratives (Ó’Catháin and O’Flanagan 1975). Irish
placenames provide keys to this ‘coded land’
whose meanings are expressed in oral, narrative
and literary modes rather than through carto-
graphic technologies or visual aesthetics
(O’Connor 1992a; 1992b). In this explanatory
framework, the many current government-funded
and private projects to recover, restore and revive
pre-colonial Irish forms of placenames are exem-
plary post-colonial projects of cultural recovery
and reclamation, restoring a damaged culture and
collective identity.
These attempts to redress the work of colonial
naming are paralleled in other contexts where
Anglophone names have been imposed over
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
pre-existing placenames. In Canada, native
placenames are now being mapped in local and
state-sponsored projects, officially reinstated
according to the wishes of local communities,
catalogued in programmes to redress the symbolic
and material damage of white settler colonization
(Nash 1998) and used to support native land claims
(Peluso 1995; Wonders 1987). The politics of these
histories of colonial naming and post-colonial
renaming is apparently straightforward. Yet, as
recent approaches to culture – and to language and
place in particular – show, ideas of cultural origins,
purity and authenticity called upon in reinstating a
pre-colonial placename can have more problematic
implications, linked in complex ways to concepts
of gender, race and nationhood (Berg and Kearns
1996). These anti-colonial arguments are powerful
critical perspectives in a context of colonial domi-
nance, but they are less adequate as models for
cultural identity in the post-independence state. So
while a critique of colonial naming would seem to
support projects of cultural recovery, the ideas of
cultural purity, authenticity and essentialism upon
which they are based have also been the subject
of criticism. The tensions involved in recovering
tradition and shaping an inclusive yet sustaining
sense of place are evident in Seamus Heaney’s
placename poems of the early seventies. Here
Heaney’s work in according value to Gaelic
placenames and Gaelic tradition depended on
more problematic gender and cultural polarities.
The problem of origins
An anti-colonial critique of naming would seem to
invite a celebration of cultural reappropriation,
resistance, recovery and reclamation. Though this
perspective is critical of colonial forms of represen-
tation and relations of power, there are problems
with this interpretation if it depends upon the
notion of a pure, homogenous, pre-colonial culture
suppressed by colonialism but ultimately recover-
able. Other ethnicities are edited out of the narra-
tive of the nation or defined as alien interlopers,
and the complexity, plurality and fluidity of pre-
colonial culture is forgotten in favour of the idea of
timeless tradition. Notwithstanding its early non-
political stance, the early twentieth-century Gaelic
League’s language revival movement became
linked to Catholic nationalism and the exclusive
and specifically Catholic, Gaelic and rural ideology
of Irish republicanism (Mac Póilin 1997). Despite
463
the important and formative role of Protestants
and non-conformists in Ulster during the Gaelic
revival movement (for whom a British and
Unionist identity was not incompatible with an
attachment to Gaelic cultural forms: see Mac Giolla
Chrı́ost and Aitchison 1998), by equating Gaelic
tradition with Catholicism, Gaelic placenames and
projects to recover them could be linked to a
sectarian version of cultural belonging, location
and purity.
Criticisms of Heaney’s placename poetry make
more sense of these complex issues. The
placenames in these poems were elegies of cultural
loss, especially loss of Irish as a spoken language.
They also asserted a native Gaelic identity. Writing
the Irish placenames into his poems in English
marked their resistant cultural specificity and
made them work as expressions of location and
cultural loss. For Heaney, Anglicization of place-
names and the erosion of Irish as a spoken
language is the cause of a collective psychosis,
since the patterns of identification with the land
can no longer be expressed in an alien language.
Similarly, for the poet John Montague, the modern
child’s ‘speech stumbles over lost/syllables of an
old order’ (Montague 1982, 110). Placenames are
‘shards of a lost tradition’ that hint at a shared
social memory of a landscape whose collective
meanings were part of a unifying, but now lost,
repository of community knowledge: ’The whole
landscape a manuscript/We had lost the skill to
read’ (1982, 108). To grant these placenames signifi-
cance would work as a kind of imaginative therapy
towards Irish cultural wholeness (Dantanus 1988,
192).
Although the assertion of pre-colonial local
knowledges subordinated through colonialism
and, especially, by linguistic suppression, has been
a powerful theme within post-colonial criticism,
this theory of the inseparability of language, cul-
tural identity and relationship to place depends
upon a fixed notion of both language and culture.
In addition, however much the notion of being
culturally exiled in an imposed language expresses
the cultural violence of colonialism, the persistence
of this trope depends upon a fixed version of
culture and language based on a kind of linguistic
and geographical determinism. Suggesting that
language is shaped by the landscape implies that
the loss of this original language results in an
alienation from the land. Its meanings and charac-
ter can no longer be read or expressed, and the new
464
language and, by extension, culture can only ever
remain alien and at odds with its location. Words
in this view carry cultural essences and, when
coupled with the nationalist and Catholic associ-
ations of Gaelic, imply that Gaelic placenames can
only ever be registers of a pure Gaelic, Catholic
culture. Importantly, placenames are not only
markers of the Irishness of Heaney’s poetry in
English, but are also read as markers of division in
Northern Ireland.
It is this sense of antagonistic opposites, rather
than cultural complexity in Northern Ireland, that
Heaney extended to the process of writing, to
language and to culture. He turned to gender and
the traditional poles of masculinity and femininity
to make sense of his cultural location, famously
gendering literature, language, ways of knowing
places, placenames and culture itself. Heaney
wrote of writing as an ‘encounter between mascu-
line [English] will and intelligence and feminine
[Irish] clusters of image and emotion’ (1980, 34).
Places can be known in two ways, one ‘lived,
illiterate, unconscious, Gaelic and feminine, the
other learned, literate, conscious, Anglo-Saxon and
masculine’ (1980, 131). Placenames in the Irish
language are soft, ‘guttural’, sensual and rich in
vowel sounds; the planter’s demesnes are ‘staked
out in consonants’ (1972, 33). So, like the discourses
of literary translation, Heaney’s sense of cultural
property in land and language was deeply gen-
dered (Godard 1984; Spivak 1992; Venuti 1993).
The land is the once-blank page (Gubar 1982) now
inscribed by men with the words of a ‘feminine’
language. The land, text and placename made into
cultural property and invested with the hope of
cultural reproduction and continuity must be
handed down intact like a bride from father to
groom (Chamberlain 1992, 61). If its purity has
been defiled by colonial contact it must be cleansed
and restored to faithfulness. The poem A new song
is a call to reclaim the bleaching-greens of the
Protestant linen industry and return them to the
grass of native agriculture as they ‘flood with
vowelling embrace’ (Heaney 1972, 33). For Heaney,
the linen industry stands for the basis of:
Belfast’s industrial power and its intransigent male-
fisted politics, both of which refused the feminine
element symbolised by the land of Ireland itself. (1985,
20)
So while Irish feminists have challenged the
orthodoxies of Irish national and sexual politics
Catherine Nash
(Nash 1997), and despite the ways in which the
growing numbers of Protestant Irish language
learners in Northern Ireland challenge the estab-
lished equations between political allegiance, cul-
ture and religion, Heaney’s return to tradition is
based on cultural and gender polarities (Lloyd
1993). Placenames, in Heaney’s writing at this time,
were emblems of a female landscape, expressed in
a feminine language that marked the rural place
as site of birth, bonding, organic origin and the
feminine itself (Coughlan 1991). Finding sources of
Irish identity in Gaelic placenames is not neces-
sarily problematic, unless the Gaelic language is
essentially linked to gendered notions of a pure
and Catholic Irishness. Women writing feminist
poetry in Irish and Protestant and Unionist Irish
language learners upset the neatness of Heaney’s
geographies of immutable categories of gender and
culture (McCoy 1997). Brian Friel’s play Trans-
lations and its reception illustrates the complexity
of mediating between the desire for cultural recov-
ery and the problems of returning to origins.
Rethinking Translations
Friel’s enormously influential play Translations
(1981) is based in an Irish-speaking village Baile
Beag/Ballybeg in Donegal in the 1830s whose
geography is being mapped and names altered.
Military mapping and Anglicization of the
placenames of the area have begun. At the same
time, a National School where English is to be the
medium of education is replacing the local hedge
school. Thus issues of linguistic and cultural trans-
lation, communication and change are central to
the play. Since its first performance in Derry’s
Guildhall, the play has become a key reference
point in Irish cultural politics; famously known
and widely popular, theoretically analysed,
studied as a school syllabus text and quoted in art
catalogues (Kelly 1996), geographical papers or
cartographic histories to illustrate the cultural
damage of colonial cartography (Andews 1992).
Translations is widely vaunted as a play that
dramatizes and commemorates both a moment in
the colonial history of Ireland and colonial cultural
subjugation in general (McAvera 1985). Centuries
of marginalization and ill-treatment are condensed
in the moment in which a village community finds
their placenames mutilated. This re-enactment of
the 1830s has been read as a form of repossession
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
and historical retrieval, a translation of ‘a defeated
community into the narrative of history’ (Barry
1983, 119). Most often the play is taken to be a
celebration of a lost Gaelic civilization, a lament for
its passing and a critique of colonial power.
Ironically, in light of later criticisms, many early
placename scholars looked to the Ordnance Survey
records as a rich archive to be mined in the project
of mapping alternative geographies of Gaelic
names. The most famous early placename scholar
was P W Joyce (1866; 1870), who published a series
of placename studies beginning with his famous
and still-consulted text of 1898, The origin and
history of Irish names of places (1910), whose work, it
has been suggested, prefigured the role of the
official placenames commission in Southern
Ireland years later (Ó Ceallaigh 1950). In contrast
to his contemporaries in the Gaelic League, he was
only mildly critical of the Ordnance Survey. Like
those closest to its continued work under the new
title of ‘Ordnance Survey of Ireland’, Joyce saw this
early survey and placename record as a rich source
of detailed local history (Brand 1982; Buchanan
1983; Flanagan 1976; Woods 1985). He provided a
rigorous account of the main ways in which the
placenames were changed in order for English
orthography to represent the phonology of Irish
names. For him, the Ordnance survey names were
the product of usually systematic attempts to pre-
serve Irish pronunciation at the cost of Irish
orthography, with predictable corruptions; he
claimed that by using his guide it would be easy to
work out the original Irish name. Despite his
enthusiasm for the Ordnance Survey records, in
other ways his approach to placenames mirrored
that of the cultural nationalists. After his decoding,
the Anglicized names could be keys to what Joyce
described as, ‘with the exception of about a thir-
teenth part, which are English and mostly of recent
introduction’, the heritage of ‘purely Celtic’
placenames (Joyce 1910, vi–vii; 1911, 194). For him,
systematically Anglicized and recorded names
were clues to a pure cultural heritage. This idea of
a pre-colonial cultural purity defines all other cul-
tural influences as alien and corrupting. From this
perspective, despite the diverse influences on the
toponymy of Ireland from Celtic, Norse, Norman,
Scots and English settlers, placenames can only be
Irish, true and pure or foreign, false and corrupt. By
extension, true Irishness can only be Gaelic. The
pervasiveness of the neat and dramatic story of
nineteenth-century mapping and naming and
465
twentieth-century remapping and renaming has
also been criticized for its historical inaccuracies
and elisions. Narratives that link decolonizing
Gaelic placename projects back to the native
placename lore or dindsenchas tradition of the
eighth and ninth centuries overlook the complex
processes of placename evolution, diversification,
adaptation, change and standardization in the
intervening centuries in favour of the drama of
nineteenth-century mapping and naming. This
overlooked history makes the processes of
placename change more complex but no less
political.
While arguing that the Ordnance Survey ‘did
little to repair the damage done by centuries of
anglicisation’ (Andrews 1997, 22), J H Andrews
challenges popular simplified versions of the
nineteenth-century mapping project, by examining
both the processes of placename change prior to
survey, and the nature and aims of the survey
project. Placenames, he argues, were altered by
English speakers through direct renaming and
translation, but mostly by a process of Angliciz-
ation in which English speakers attempted to adapt
the Irish names they heard to English phonetics
and orthography. The processes of experimentation
with different versions of the original Gaelic names
and the consolidation of standard forms was
already well under way before the 1830s. Andrews
(1992) outlines five sources of toponymic
change – substitution, translation, transcription
from Irish-language documents, dictation and
restoration – and argues that, despite recently
becoming ‘a metaphor symbolising all the cultural
mischief done by Englishmen in Ireland’ (1992, 11),
translation was relatively rare. Irish names were
altered, he argues, but mostly through the
processes of ‘dictation’ in which a non-Irish
speaker recorded in English orthography a
placename spoken by an Irish-speaker and turned
to English words that partially matched the sound
of the Irish name-elements but obviously not the
meaning, converting, for example, the placename
Muine Beag (meaning ‘little thicket’) to Moneybeg
(with only arbitrary meaning). There were, there-
fore, regular substitutions of English words for
approximate Irish sounds:
batter (bothar, road), boy (buidhe, yellow), carrick
(carraig, rock), drum (druim, ridge), glass (glas, green),
inch (inis, island), kill (cell, church), knock (cnoc, hill),
letter (leitir, slope), more (mor, great), muck (muc, pig),
roe (ruadh, red), ton (toin, back), Anna (eanach, marsh),
466
Garry (garrdha, garden), Owen (abhainn, river), Ross
(ros, wood), Terry (tir, land), and Tom (tuaim, mound).
(Andrews J H 1992, 13)
It was these substitutions that P W Joyce looked to
for clues to the original Gaelic names. Irish names,
Andrews argues, were not simply translated. New
English names were introduced, but mostly for
market towns, country houses, villages and farms
newly established through plantation (Muhr 1992a,
xii). Furthermore, those charged with recording
Irish placenames encountered not only Gaelic
versions but often a whole series of different
Anglicized versions. They were ordered to record
them all, and map not the most English-sounding
version but the Anglicized spellings that most
accurately represented the original Gaelic name
(Muhr 1992a, ix). To achieve this, the Irish scholar
John O’Donovan was employed to talk to Irish
speakers and find out the Irish forms to be
recorded in the ‘name-books’ but not published on
the maps. John O’Donovan’s work as the first
professor of Celtic in Queen’s University, Belfast,
and the foundation there in 1952 of the Ulster
Place-name Society (Muhr 1992a, x), similarly
pulls apart the neatness of the model of colonial
naming and decolonizing renaming. The target of
Andrew’s attack is not the claim that power,
authority and mapping are linked, but the over-
simplified yet orthodox reading of the Ordnance
Survey project prompted by the enormous impact
of Friel’s play Translations. While Andrews blames
Friel for promulgating this version of placename
history, it is possible to read Translations against the
grain of its popular interpretation to reveal a more
subtle approach than Andrews suspects. Instead,
the play offers a more complex post-colonial cul-
tural politics of language and location. Some sense
of how alternative critical versions of identity,
tradition and authenticity are emerging in Irish
culture can be gained by considering the different
ways in which Translations has been taken to sup-
port anti-colonial, nationalist and, more recently,
post-colonial versions of Irish cultural identity. I
argue here that Translations is not simply a
representation of a simple historical geography
of placename change but a complex interven-
tion into the discourses of place and naming in
Ireland.
While Andrews is troubled by the historical
elisions of the anti-colonial reading of Translations,
Edna Longley is critical of the way the play
promulgates a dangerous romantic nationalism.
Catherine Nash
For Longley, the ‘play does not so much examine
myths of dispossession and oppression but repeat
them’ in its dream of a return to a ‘mythic land-
scape of beauty and plenitude that is pre-Partition,
pre-Civil War, pre-famine, pre-plantation and pre-
Tudor’ (quoted in Kearney 1988, 154–5). So, for
some, this play critically commemorates and
laments the destruction of native culture. For
others, it perpetuates romantic nativist and
nationalist readings of Irish history. Yet Friel is not
uncritical of this romanticism. In writing the play,
one aspect that kept eluding him was ‘the whole-
ness, the integrity, of that Gaelic past’; he admits
‘maybe I don’t believe in it’ (Friel no date, 58). Both
the celebration of the play as anti-colonial and the
criticism of its repetition of simplistic versions of
pure pre-colonial Gaelic culture obscure his more
complex project. Drawing on George Steiner’s
(1975) work on translation and limits in any act of
communication, Friel explores ways of replacing
language. This is not by seeking a return to a
pure linguistic and cultural identity but by shaping
the language of renaming (English) into local
forms.
For Friel, loss of Irish does not preclude the
possibility of Irish cultural expression. Language
must be made to ‘bear the burden’ of Irish cultural
experience, since,
with the use of the English language, the understand-
ing of words, the whole cultural burden that every
word in the English language carries is slightly
different to our burden. (Kearney 1988, 125)
For him, the Irish experience of language shift –
having ‘parents who were native Irish speakers’
(124) – is not equivalent to gradual language
evolution. Thus, English, for Friel, is inappropriate
for expressing Irish experience, but only until it is
made ‘identifiably our own language’ (in Kearney
1988, 183). As in other post-colonial contexts,
Irish writing reflects an experience of bilingualism
and a history of translating back and forth
between languages (Cronin 1991). Writing to
‘match the rhythms’ of speech patterns in Ireland
and dispel the unhelpful shadow cast by the
dominance of ‘the sound of the English language’
(quoted in Dantanas 1988, 183), Friel appropriates
English and rejects the authority of its standard
form.
Read through this perspective, Translations is not
simply a lament for the loss of the native language.
In the play, Hugh the hedge schoolmaster
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
represents a call for the appropriation of English:
‘We must learn those new names. We must learn
where we live. We must learn to make them our
own. We must make them our new home’ (Friel
1981, 66). Friel therefore questions the notion of an
organic and unchanging relationship between
words and things, between a culture and a lan-
guage, between language and place, by having
Hugh assert that ‘words are signals, counters. They
are not immortal’ (1981, 43). Viewing language as
static and fossilized into the contours of a particu-
lar culture denies the possibility of a creative
evolution of language and culture. However
important the language is to Irish culture and
identity, Friel questions the existence of an uncor-
rupted pool of Irishness deep within the Irish
language, or an essential Englishness in the English
language. By managing to convince the audience
that the characters are speaking Irish, he demon-
strates that it is possible to represent their experi-
ence as situated colonial subjects through a
language that was not theirs. Translations thus
explores issues of identity and language and the
possibilities of appropriating standard English and
moulding its idioms to convey a history of cultural
loss, change and innovation. Modern literature in
English, it is often argued, has been enriched by
Irish linguistic adaptation and irony. Post-colonial
literature in English, including work by Irish
writers, has developed from the creative, irrever-
ent, strategic and subversive appropriation of the
English language, remoulded to fit and express the
identities and experiences of the colonized and
post-colonial cultures (Kiberd 1994).
If this rethinking of language has come from
post-colonial literary theory, ideas of language
have also been drawn on to rethink culture more
widely. Ideas of the ideal purity of language as a
model of culture have been rejected in favour of
the notion of language as a dynamic system of
making and communicating meaning, and so also
of reimagining culture as fluid and constantly in
process. An anti-colonial approach to placenames
and to culture more widely often depends on the
idea of a stable, secure and uncontested toponymic
archive or a cultural purity that can be restored. Yet
this is itself the product of nationalist construc-
tions. Returning to an older name is not just a
simple act of cultural recovery if the celebration
of the pre-colonial cultures devalues and
deligitimates present-day names, cultures and
identities resulting from the complexity of colonial
467
encounters, or if the turn to the past means an
avoidance or rejection of the cultural plurality and
complexity of the present. In contrast, post-
colonialism retains a critical sense of the damage of
colonialism while rejecting exclusive notions of
cultural purity. Yet, as will become apparent, this
does not mean that there can be no criteria for
cultural resistance nor any sense of the specificity
or value of tradition. Campaigns to reinstate or
retain Gaelic placenames thus negotiate the critical
languages of cultural recovery, recuperation and
authenticity and of cultural appropriation,
adaptation and syncretism.
Thus Friel’s play can be read both as a
re-enactment of a particular moment in Ireland’s
colonial history and as an allegory for Irish
experience of colonialism, power, resistance and
intercultural contact (Kelly 1996, 11). The play
criticizes both colonial history and the limiting
historical orthodoxies of Irish nationalism. Hugh
claims that in his culture, ‘[we] like to think that
we endure around truths immemorially posited’
(Friel 1981, 42), but he speaks for the fluidity and
textuality of history in claiming:
it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history that shape
use, but images of the past embodied in language . . .
we must never cease renewing those images because
once we do we fossilise. (1981, 66).
Hugh rejects the word ‘always’.
Shaun Richards offers another reading (1997a;
1997b). He rejects recent interpretations of the play
through the character of Hugh and his recommen-
dation to learn to live in the new culture, which
overlook Friel’s complex interrogation of authen-
ticity and origins in favour of simply rejecting any
sense of sustaining tradition (Kiberd 1995). For
him, the play is the beginning of Friel’s ‘troubled’
return to ideas of identity, authenticity and origins.
To counter both the celebration of hybridity in
cultural studies and the deconstructive dead end of
postmodernism, Richards suggests a perspective
that offers an alternative to the polarized choice
between essentialism and hybridity. Drawing on
Spivak’s ‘strategic use of a positivist essentialism’
and Ashis Nandy’s concept of ‘critical traditional-
ism’, Richards recommends reconsidering the sus-
taining aspect of traditions that can progressively
rather than regressively counter colonial or con-
temporary global cultural erosion. This attempt
to displace the binary opposition between romantic
essentialism and critical deconstruction is a
468
significant addition to the current work of thinking
about Ireland beyond the binaries of insider/
outsider, Celt/Saxon (Maley et al 1997). Richards
identifies in modern Irish drama a ‘progressive
regression’ to ideas of origins and authenticity that
can be a critical rather then retrogressive alterna-
tive to the limbo of suspended identifications. But
there are two problems with this. Richards does
not explicitly consider the way in which ideas of
return to origins have frequently been based on
gendered notions of the home, land or nation. Nor
does he interrogate the implication that his notion
of strategic return to traditions is based on a return
to a specifically Gaelic culture, problems that were
evident in Heaney’s poetic project. It is not clear
whether a critical traditionalism in Ireland includes
those traditions shaped in difference to the Gaelic –
specifically Northern Unionist – traditions. The
crucial question in contemporary Irish identity
politics is whether a reinvigorated notion of cul-
tural location for all traditions in Ireland can avoid
the ways those traditions have been based on
opposition to each other.
The ways in which ideas of history and identity
are articulated in discussions of placenames raise
questions about the rejection of ideas of authentic-
ity and cultural rootedness. Locating the practices
of placenaming within Irish cultural politics
suggests that both simply celebrating cultural re-
cuperation and rejecting any claim to cultural
authenticity are flawed strategies for accommodat-
ing cultural differences. Instead, as I want to argue
here, approaches to placenames in contemporary
Ireland offer models for a critical return to tradition
and cultural location. If it is questionable to cel-
ebrate contemporary attempts to research and
restore original Irish names as unproblematic
moves to cultural recovery, and, by implication,
cultural purity, the alternative of condemning them
as only reinforcing essentialist versions of Irish
identity is equally inadequate. The placename
projects discussed here suggest another way of
reconceptualizing cultural location and a critical
sense of place. The rest of this paper traces the
cultural politics and cultural geographies of topo-
nymic change in campaigns and projects to record,
preserve and keep placenames in use in Northern
Ireland and in the South. The discourses of mean-
ing, authenticity and significance surrounding the
Townland Campaign in Northern Ireland, includ-
ing Heaney’s responses to it, also point to more
complex senses of cultural location.
Catherine Nash
Placename projects: pluralism and
authenticity
The debates about culture, naming, place and
language that Friel’s play prompted were also
being stimulated from another direction. Since the
early 1970s, placenames in Northern Ireland have
become the focus of a popular campaign, neither to
de-Anglicize the names, nor replace them with
their earlier versions, but to conserve placenames
in their current form. In 1973, the post office in
Northern Ireland made the controversial decision
to implement a system for the modernization of
postal deliveries in rural areas, and (in order to use
the newly devised postcode system) rural roads
were named and houses allotted numbers along
them. The person’s name, house or farm name,
townland name, and parish as basis of address
were replaced by a house number, road name and
nearest postal town. The focus of this campaign
were the names of townlands, the smallest admin-
istrative unit of the land based on the traditional
territorial division of the country into counties,
baronies, parishes and townlands (Dallat 1991).
The townland system is considered to be one
of the
most distinguishing marks of Ireland and the term
townland itself, while unknown in the homeland of the
English language, is recognised in all parts of Ireland.
(Ó Maolfabhail 1978, 3)
As a subdivision of the civil parish, there are over
60 000 townlands in Ireland as a whole, ranging in
size from 50 to 250 acres (Mac Aodha 1989;
Ó Maolfabhail 1991, viii). Though the post office
did not prohibit the use of townland names, it
was felt that the scheme meant that their use was
no longer necessary, recognized or legal. Now
redundant in addresses, they would, it was felt,
eventually no longer be used, spoken or remem-
bered (Flanagan 1978). The rural road could be
named with reference to one of the townlands
through which it passed, but the remainder would
be left superfluous to the new postal address
system. While reminiscent of the campaign by the
Gaelic league to have Irish placenames recognized
by the post office at the beginning of the twentieth
century (Andrews L 1997), the campaign did not
entail arguing for a return to the Irish forms of
placenames, but for ensuring that local names as
they were currently known did not fall out of
everyday use.
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
Resistance to the way the postcode system was
being implemented was mainly expressed through
the seminars, lobbying, petitions and publicity
organized by the Townlands Sub-Committee of the
Ulster Federation for Local Studies, an umbrella
organization for many local groups (Johnson 1977;
Hume 1989; 1990).1 In 1976, the Federation issued
The post office and rural addresses in Northern Ireland –
a federation statement, which sought to increase
public awareness of the damage being done
through the inappropriate use of postcodes and to
channel resistance to the system (Canavan 1991,
56–7). More specifically, the Federation sought to
revoke the power invested in the post office by the
local district councils. On 13 October 1990 – desig-
nated Townlands Day – a petition of almost ten
thousand signatures was submitted to government
(Hume 1991, 55). The post office has since con-
ceded the right to use townland names on ad-
dresses. Now many district councils are promoting
townland names through signs, posters and maps
and revising the postcodes to be based on the
townlands as they are in Fermanagh, whose district
council resisted the original postcode scheme from
the beginning (Canavan 1992). The arguments
for keeping the townland names alive concerned
location, identity and cultural attachment.
According to the campaign documentation, once
evidence appeared of the decline and disuse of the
townland name, protest was mobilized against
the post office in a cross-community effort to save
the nomenclature of the Irish landscape from a
linear, street-based system designed for English
towns and cities, which would be inappropriate in
the country.2 Yet the discourses of location and
identity that emerged in the campaign involved
complex and often contradictory notions of
‘native’, regional, environmental, local and global
knowledges and forms of identification. Most
apparent was the argument that the townland
names were unique to Ireland and distinguished it
from Wales, Scotland and England. Furthermore,
the postcode system would erode the degree to
which it would be possible to identify a rural
address and so undermine a sense of the rural
character of much of Northern Ireland. For Pat
Loughrey, the second great threat to the communal
identity of rural Northern Ireland after mechanized
agriculture comes from the post office.
The fact that country people do not live along roads
was not allowed to impede the master plan. Linear
addresses were imposed upon country communities
469
who have always been known and had known them-
selves by spatial divisions . . . A generation of children
are growing up who have never used their townland
names in their addresses. A fundamental element in
our identity is being lost.
Townland names, like the landscape to which they
relate, are precious records of the history, legends and
mythology of their communities. For the countless
generations who had no written literature, townland
names became the index-cards upon which memories
are stored. They are the pages of our literary landscape,
the focus of our oral tradition. (Loughrey 1986, 211)
But the townland names are also being used in
urban projects. Campaigns to erect Irish street-
names and rename housing estates in West Belfast
in the 1980s, along with the use of Irish in
Republican murals and slogans, seemed to
reconfirm the link between the Irish language,
Catholicism and Republicanism (O’Reilly 1998).
Yet, alternative discourses of identity are also being
expressed through placenames and maps. In 1991,
the Northern Ireland Place-name Project and
Ultach Trust/Iontaobhas Ultach, a British
government-funded organization that aims to pro-
mote the Irish language throughout the entire
community in Northern Ireland, produced a poster
of a map of Belfast called Béal Feirste/Belfast, Bailte
Fearainn/Townlands (Figure 1). Here the names of all
areas of the city share an origin in Gaelic, a
common Anglicization and an English translation.
Mapped and listed on the poster, they seem to
speak of a shared and complex history of diverse
cultural influences rather than simple antagonism
between two supposedly discrete and homogenous
cultural groups. In spite of the contested politiciz-
ation of the Irish language in Northern Ireland, the
association of people with the townland names
was felt to override political, class and cultural
differences as people united against a common
threat. For some, saving these predominately
Gaelic placenames was ‘a task in which all Irish-
men can unite regardless of political difference’
(quoted in Dallat 1991, 9). Drawing on the dis-
courses of local history and cultural diversity
within the government programme of ‘education
for mutual understanding’ (Canavan 1990; Dallat
1989), townland names and maps are being
enlisted in local history, inner-city youth schemes
and community reconciliation projects that empha-
size the shared and diverse histories and cultures
in the province (Doherty 1989). Attachments to
places and their local history and traditions,
 470

Figure 1 Poster produced in 1991 by the Northern Ireland Place-name Project and Ultach Trust
Source: Reproduced by kind permission of Iontaobhas Ultach/Ultach Trust
Catherine Nash
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
despite all the horrors of ‘blood and soil’ dis-
courses of ethnicity and nationalism, are being
refigured as valuable and valid ways of critically
and creatively addressing complex questions of
identity in Northern Ireland.
The problems of cultural identity and political
status there challenge the adequacy and impli-
cations of the theoretical frameworks deployed
in cultural studies, especially the tendency, which
Katharyne Mitchell (1997) has criticized, to
celebrate hybridity over authenticity, dislocation
over location, mobility over rootedness. Though
tradition and rootedness have been criticized for
their languages of purity and exclusion, what are
needed for Northern Ireland, as Brian Graham
(1994a; 1994b; 1997) has argued, are new models of
belonging, new senses of place and cultural lo-
cation. The political conflict in Northern Ireland, he
argues, is a product not only of the exclusiveness of
Gaelic Irishness within Irish nationalism but the
failure of Unionist traditions to forge a sense of
located cultural identity in Ireland. Ironically, the
rejection of essentialist and nationalist versions of
Irishness needs to be paralleled not by the simple
deconstruction of Unionist identities but by the
shaping of a Protestant identification with place
within a plural Ireland ‘in which regional and
cultural heterogeneity is the defining ethos’
(Graham 1997, 54). This positive discourse of Prot-
estant location clearly does not automatically entail
forgetting the colonial origins of the contemporary
conflict, nor the asymmetries of power in Northern
Ireland over this century. While ideas of belonging
have been criticized for their exclusionary tenden-
cies, any resolution of conflict in Northern Ireland
depends on new inclusive senses of location rather
than the deconstruction of belonging, and the
acceptance of ‘varieties of Irishness’ (Foster 1989)
and different ‘styles of belonging’ (Lundy and Mac
Póilin 1992). Placenames can be part of this.
The Ulster Federation for Local Studies, for
example, receives financial support from the
Cultural Traditions Programme, which aims to
increase awareness and appreciation of cultural
diversity in Northern Ireland. Placenames are
being explored in school projects in Northern
Ireland in which the varied origins of placenames
in the region are examined in order to consider
ideas of location and diversity (Bardon 1991a;
1991b). The Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland’s
bilingual map – Éire Thuaidh/Ireland North – is a
cultural map of Irish placenames and a gazetteer
471
listing the names of 450 original Irish settlements,
and was produced in close cooperation with the
Department of Celtic Studies at Queen’s University
of Belfast and the Placenames Section of Ordnance
Survey of Ireland in Dublin (Beckett 1992).
Townland names are still being recorded on the
Ordnance Survey maps, and, on some maps relating
to urban areas, townland boundaries are being
added for the first time.3 In 1987, a grant was
awarded to the Celtic Department, Queen’s Univer-
sity of Belfast (the home of the Ulster Place-name
Society), which supported research on origins of all
placenames appearing on the 1:50 000 map as:
an exemplary, historical and cultural work which will
reveal the complexities of placenames and their
linguistic, geographical, social and historical aspects.
(Muhr 1990, 109; 1991, 25–6)
Here, discourses of cultural recovery, conservation
and cultural pluralism are combined. Resistance to
metropolitan marginalization of local knowledge
and experience avoids exclusionary languages of
the local. For Heaney (1991, xi–xii), as a student
seeing the townland names he had known since
childhood appear in ‘official print’ was ‘something
like a premonition of demarginalisation’. Al-
though, as I have already argued, Heaney had
earlier emphasized the placename as an emblem of
division, in writing for the Ulster Federation for
Local Studies, his version of the local is precisely
the scale of an identity that is both located and
unantagonistic. The shifts in Heaney’s thinking
represent broader developments in approaches to
Irish identity in Ireland over the last twenty-years.
Recalling the poet Patrick Kavanagh, Heaney
(1991, xi) makes the townland name an emblem of
local knowledge and a ‘parochial imagination’ that
is never in any doubt about the social and artistic
validity of its parish . . . Empowered within its own
horizon, it looks out but does not necessarily look up to
the metropolitan centres. Its impulses and possibilities
abound within its boundaries but are not limited by
them. It is self-sufficient but not self-absorbed, capable
of thought; undaunted, pristine, spontaneous; a correc-
tive to the inflations of nationalism and the cringe of
provincialism.
The townland name, for Heaney,
connotes a totally uninsistent sense of difference,
a freely espoused relation to an idiom and identity that
are regional, authentic, uncoerced and acknowledged.
It is a minimal but reliable shared possession, the kind
of word that could be agreed upon in the beginning
472
as a means to an end, the kind of word that could
provide the right verbal foundation for talks about
talks . . . it is both gutsy and non-sectarian in an
unself-congratulatory way.
Here, townland names are pointers to ‘authen-
ticity’ and pluralism, to identity and ‘dialogue’.
The Townland Campaign was, for Heaney, a means
towards community reconciliation. Townland
names stand as ‘unpolluted channels that remain
open to the copiousness and multifariousness at
the head of the past’. To lose them
is to hamper these bountiful recognitions and to
attenuate the possibilities of a more informed and
consequently more absolved future for everybody.
(Heaney 1991, xii)
Similarly, Tony Canavan, the Development Officer
for the Federation, argues that the answers to
questions of identity and heritage prompted by
the ‘troubles’ can be looked for in the local. For
Canavan,
townlands help tell the story of the settlement of
Ireland from the Celtic peoples who established town-
lands, through the Norse, Normans, English, Scots and
others who have settled in Ireland and left their mark
on the landscape. Although predominantly Gaelic,
townland names bear the distinctive influence of the
different peoples who have become part of the Irish
fabric. The continued use of townlands and their
acceptance as their own by all sections of the com-
munity in Ulster makes them a unique and priceless
element of our cultural heritage . . . If we are seeking to
heal the wounds that divide our society and to illus-
trate the richness of what we share, then townlands
have a crucial role to play. For they are not only part of
a past which we all share but are a living part of the
present too. (Canavan 1991, 51–2)
Though both the region and the local are being
called on in Ireland in attempts to craft languages
of culture and identity that bypass the troubled
state of the nation (Whelan 1992; 1993), the local
can be just as prone to exclusiveness. Even within
individual arguments about their conservation, the
tension between characterizing the placenames
as emblems of a lost culture and source of
contemporary shared culture was evident. Deirdre
Flanagan, the late editor of the Bulletin of the Ulster
Place-name Society, for example, suggested that the
identification with townland names is an ‘instinc-
tive, traditional and deep-rooted’ characteristic
both of ‘planter and of Gael . . . at all levels from
tenant to lord’, and equally strong for both the
Catherine Nash
emigrant and resident. Since most Gaelic townland
names were adopted by
17th century English-speaking settlers and their
descendants . . . [T]he townland pattern and townland
names are the basis of what in toponymic terms,
constitutes the identity of modern Ireland to both
native and visitor. (Flanagan 1978, 1–2)
Yet her characterization of the townland names as
‘the only record which survives of kin-groups and
families who once held the land, particularly in
heavily planted areas where native families were
dispossessed’ suggests a more troubled history. In
contrast, one local politician could proclaim ‘Over
my dead body will they put an Irish name on
Drimnahuncheon’ (probably itself a Gaelic name
dróim na h-uinnsinne ‘ridge of the ash’). At an Ulster
Local Studies Seminar on Townlands in 1989,
another campaigner stated ‘I know of many people
like myself who are as proud of their townland
name as of the orange sash in their cupboard’
(Muhr 1992b). The attachments that pivot around
the placename can be complicated and contentious,
pluralistic and partisan. The recent erection of
street and placename signs in the predominantly
Protestant area of the north Ards Pennisula in
County Down that are bilingual – not English/
Irish but English/Ulster-Scots – is part of a move to
promote the Ulster-Scots variant of Lowland Scots
as a minority language, and, through it, to assert
the link between Scotland and Protestant Ulster.
Here, placenames are deployed in a move, recog-
nized in the 1998 peace agreement, towards
asserting both cultural difference and a sense of
belonging in Northern Ireland through historical
connections with Scotland. The cultural status of
both Gaelic and Ulster Scots are supported in the
agreement (Northern Ireland Office 1998, 19).
Placenames can be emblems of loss and cultural
dislocation; they can also point to complex senses
of place, location and identity in which an attach-
ment to one place is shaped though a sense of
connection to other places.
This sense of interconnected geographies was
also enlisted in support for protecting the town-
land names, because of their importance in
genealogical searches for Irish roots. Their practical
and symbolic value within the memories and
genealogies of the Irish diaspora worldwide is
evident in the publication of poetic as well as
conventional gazetteers overseas (Kehoe 1982;
O’Laughlin 1994). Names ‘which are kept alive so
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
far from home’ should, it was argued, be ‘kept
alive in their native place’ (Ó Maolfabhail 1978, 5).
In this sense, placenames are clues to family his-
tory and can tell a history in which the different
cultural influences of centuries of settlement are
part of a rich and plural Irish culture. The
placenames of Northern Ireland are being used as a
way of forging a sense of a rich, diverse, but also
regionally distinctive culture. Globally important,
they have also become emblems of local knowl-
edges that are resistant to metropolitan domi-
nation. Moving between languages of authenticity
and pluralism, conservation and diversity, town-
land placenames are enlisted in searches for roots
and searches for peace.
Rather than see Irish placenames as necessarily
linked to traditional ideologies of Irish cultural
nationalism, many in both Northern Ireland and
the Republic share Canavan’s sense of placenames
as keys to more complex histories and diverse
cultural influences. Those most involved in
researching the origins of Irish placenames in
Southern Ireland, for example, despite their invest-
ment in the Irish language, reject the idea that all
placenames in Ireland should be restored to pre-
Anglicized forms. At a seminar in Dublin in
1992 organized by the Placenames Branch of the
Ordnance Survey of Ireland and An Coimisiún
Logainmneacha on policy regarding placenames,
the Irish historian Donnchadh Ó Corráin rejected
the notion of somehow ethnically cleansing
placenames in Ireland. Renaming, he argued,
where it involves the removal of names that have
become part of history, should not usually be under-
taken. I do not for one moment suggest that the
names of the chief governors of Ireland should be
erased from the record or that there should be mas-
sive gaelicisation of non-Irish names. To my mind,
such an undertaking is the work of the vandal – like
that of the vandals who destroyed the Public Record
of Ireland or dynamited Nelson’s pillar in the name of
republicanism of one kind or another. That kind of
renaming would destroy the main strands of our
history and corrupt the record of the past for
ideology’s sake. (Ó Corráin 1992, 37)
Citing evidence of ‘pre-Celtic, Gaelic, British, Old
Norse, Norman French, Flemish and English
names’ (44) and the names introduced by the
planters and ‘big-house’ families, he suggests that,
‘Anyone who imagines so or may entertain any
foolish ideas about purity of race is very quickly
proved wrong by our placenames’ (42). But read-
473
ing the different sources of the nomenclature of
Ireland as evidence of its complex history does not
mean that questions of authenticity and suitability
are simply abdicated. Whereas the titles of estate
villages named after their landowners offended the
Gaelic League, now the names given to new hous-
ing estates by property developers keen to match
buyers’ aspirations are the main cause of concern.
In 1977 and 1986, the Southern Irish government
issued circulars to local authorities, followed by
guidelines in 1992, recommending that local
authorities should try to ensure that these new
names are historically linked to the area being
developed and that traditional local names are
used wherever possible (Department of Local
Government 1977; Department of Environment
1986; Ordnance Survey Ireland and Coimisiún
Logainmneacha 1992). This was in response to the
increasing tendency of developers to adopt English
name elements such as Downs, Dene, Copse, Hurst
or Spinney as well as arbitrary use of the names
of trees in road and estate names, such as The
Brambles or Ailesbury Oaks, in their efforts to give
convey the status and prestige of their projects; or,
as Liam Mac Mathúna, an Irish language scholar,
put it ‘where cohorts of Hadleighs, Hamptons,
Westburys and Westminsters team up with squads of
Closes, Copses, Downes and Mewses’ (Mac Mathúna
1992, 67–8; Ó Corráin 1992, 35). The issue is clearly
to combine some sense of authentic connection
with place with a plural sense of history; not to
reject modernity for tradition, but to negotiate
critically between them. In the west of Ireland, the
connotations of ideas of authenticity and origin are
inevitably more loaded with the popular currency
of romantic and nationalist celebrations of the
region, with the critical rejection of their narrow
and nostalgic terms, and with the continued exist-
ence of native speakers there. When the aim of
placename research projects is to recover and
decide upon an appropriate version of a place-
name, the problems of combining both authenticity
and pluralism are practical, philosophical and
political. Yet, in this context also, the notion of
authenticity of identity, place and placename is
both displaced and retained.
For over twenty years, Tim Robinson has
researched and recorded the local histories, knowl-
edges, mythologies, folklore and placenames of
Connemara, the Burren and the Aran Islands in
Galway, which nineteenth-century British maps of
the area did not represent or misrepresented in the
474
‘anglicised garblings that smelled of centuries of
cultural imperialism’ (Robinson 1990a, 23). The re-
sults of Robinson’s project are recorded in maps
(1977; 1990b), literary guides (1985; 1990a; 1995;
1996) and now an electronic database. Motivated
by the historical and contemporary erosion of
the Irish language, Robinson makes maps that
are tools of linguistic, historical, folkloric and
placename conservation, mapping local cultural
geographies and placenames that are being forgot-
ten as the Irish language, the livelihoods that re-
quired such detailed knowledge of land and coast,
and local mythologies pass out of practice. For
Robinson, a placename reins in history, folklore,
social codes and beliefs, and ties them through a
shared language to a location in space. Anglicization
of Gaelic names severs these ties. His exhaustive
research, walking the region, talking to the people
who remember the stories of holy wells or field
names, is an effort to restore these connections to
place, and is recognized as a prize-winning work of
conservation. In 1987, Tim and Máiréad Robinson,
representing Ireland with their place-name research
project and competing with large-scale ecological
environmental projects, won the Ford European
Conservation Award (Robinson 1992b; Irish Times
1988). But, like other post-colonial projects to re-
cover, record, memorialize, conserve and legitimate
forms of local knowledge, belief and experience that
had been devalued within colonial cultures, this
effort of recovery is always haunted by the impli-
cation that in so doing, essentialist versions of
national culture as exclusively rural and Gaelic find
support. Robinson negotiates the tensions involved
in celebrating a region with a long history of being
visited as a source of authenticity and meaning in
romantic searches for the self and national spirit,
and implicitly criticizes the structures of power that
have impacted upon it.
Despite his awareness of the mutating nature
of toponyms over time, Robinson still seeks a
measure of accuracy in tracing their origins. The
multiple forms and meaning of the placenames are,
for him, part of their accumulated significance. A
placename, he writes,
is perpetually gathering and shedding meanings; it
comes down to us a loose bundle which may or may
not still contain that kernel, the initial grain of sense
that set it rolling through time. (Robinson 1990a, 116)
His collection of the varied forms of placenames
and the stories of their origins negotiates between
Catherine Nash
postmodern undecidability of meaning and the
scholarly aim of certainty. Yet, post-structuralism
does not, for him, invalidate his project of recovery.
Instead, some measure of truth resides with a
placename’s multiple forms. For him, there is,
a tempting resonance in the idea that all interpretations
are open to question, that certainty is endlessly
deferred. One hears of the ‘death of the author’, the
impossibility of grounding literary readings in the
intentions of the writer – and no author is as deeply
under the sod as the originators of placenames. But to
be sensible, in the majority of cases one can arrive by
historical and linguistic enquiry, by guesswork and
emendation, by hook or by St Patrick’s crook, at what
we might call truth. At the same time, misinterpretation
is part of the life of a placename. (Robinson 1992a, 4)
These misinterpretations also act as guides to place
and mark out places from undifferentiated space.
For, as Robinson writes:
We are all prone to error, we are all strangers on our
own land. As language changes course like a river over
the centuries, sometimes a placename gets left behind,
beached, far from the flood of meaning. Then another
meander of the river reaches it, interpreting it perhaps
in another way, revivifying it. The sound may have to
be bent to allow this to happen. Eventually the original
meaning may be for ever irrecoverable, or it may only
be accessible to the learned. Locally, or at a personal
level, it is still a name, a pointer, a misdirection
perhaps, to the place. (1992a, 4–5)
This validation of misdirected but meaningful
senses of place, as well the search for ‘what
we might call truth’, displaces languages of cer-
tainty and authenticity and origins; but it also
holds on to them. In similar ways, An Coimisiún
Logainmneacha seeks to arrive at an official
standard Gaelic version of toponyms without
implying ‘any disparagement of traditional
pronunciation’ due to local custom or dialect
(Ó Maolfabhail 1989, xxv). The study of place-
names, Robinson suggests, can be a window to
detailed local knowledges and inclusive versions
of belonging. Local knowledges that can be learned
through placenames replace Gaelic genealogy as
the criteria for a meaningful sense of cultural
location in Ireland. So, although ideas of land and
language, and the placenames that link them, have
been central to essentialist and exclusive versions
of national identity, the discourses surrounding
placenames in contemporary Ireland combine a
critique of modern and colonial forms of cultural
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
erosion, a sense of the value of collective cultural
identities and an openness to diverse histories and
cultural traditions.
Conclusion: post-colonial locations
Recent approaches to placenames in Ireland are
informed by a very immediate sense of the impli-
cations of their versions of culture and location.
Most significantly, while emerging out of attempts
to recover, record and promote the use of Gaelic
placenames, they combine the project of historical
and cultural retrieval with a resistance to fixing
Irish culture or simplifying Irish history. But
espousing the language of cultural pluralism does
not mean relinquishing claims to the validity, sig-
nificance or meaning of specific cultural traditions.
While Friel’s play offered some sense of the possi-
bilities of reappropriating a sense of location out of
the often unequal economies of cultural exchange,
Heaney’s gendered geographies of a Gaelic culture
suggested some of the problems of shaping a
cultural home. Yet, instead of opting for one rather
than the other, many of those involved in place-
name projects combine and negotiate ideas of
pluralism, multiplicity and diversity with those of
authenticity, belonging, truth and meaning. In this
way, they manage to be critical both of historical
and contemporary cultural imperialism and also of
notions of ‘pure’ culture, both holding on to
notions of truth and authenticity and displacing
them. However complicated by the frequently
oppositional nature of tradition and identity, these
contemporary placename projects represent efforts
critically and creatively to imagine concepts of
identity, place and tradition that simultaneously
reject antagonistic discourses of pure, timeless,
eternal identities and cultures rooted in place and
retain a sense of the value of tradition, place and
culture to personal and collective identities – a
shared sense of relationship to a geography that
signifies a diverse and plural history rather than a
primordial past. Placenames can always be enlisted
in essentialist articulations of identity, but what is
so notable about contemporary approaches to
them in Ireland is the expression of a critical but
inclusive recuperation of located tradition. The
townland names campaign seemed to point to the
ways in which the linguistic, cultural and spatial
registers of the placename can be decoupled from
an exclusive ethnic identity. Gaelic placenames can,
475
it suggests, act as emblems of cultural diversity.
These projects suggest a self-consciously critical
sense of belonging and an inclusive sense of
location. They both register the complexity of
identity politics in Ireland and can inform under-
standings of post-colonial cultural politics within
geography, or what could be called post-colonial
locations, more widely.
The term ‘post-colonial locations’ suggests at
least two ways of spatializing theory. The first is
the work of locating post-colonial theories, dis-
mantling their globalizing implications by attend-
ing to the specificities of different post-colonial
contexts. Ireland, a former colony on the edge of
Europe but part of the white, European ‘centre’,
with its specific history of invasion, colonization
and migration, disrupts dominant models of
European colonies and post-colonial contexts out-
side Europe. But it also suggests a need to differ-
entiate more widely the geographies of colonialism
and post-colonialism, to pay attention to the
specific configurations of contact, conquest and
influence, pre-colonial social structures and
ethnicities, different trajectories of independence
and different social patterns and politics between
indigenous people, settlers and more recent
migrants. Secondly, and central to my concerns
here, the notion of post-colonial locations suggests
the task of thinking again about place-based
identities or located cultures.
In contrast to the tendency within some recent
critical approaches in geography and cultural
studies to delegitimate attachments to place, con-
temporary placename projects in Ireland provide a
sense of what can be gained by critically reappro-
priating the language of belonging, tradition and
senses of located identity. In response both to the
violence of ethnic nationalism, where blood and
soil ideally combine in ethically pure and politi-
cally autonomous states, and, more generally, to
the reactionary discourses of class, race and gender
that accompany romantic versions of the valued
places – such as spaces of ‘national heritage’ –
expressions of pride, love, fondness and attach-
ment to places have become deeply suspect, rarely
mentioned except in condemnation. Instead,
geography and identity can only be related if the
geography is one of movement and the identity
hybrid. This critical moment is dominated by a
polarized choice between rootedness in place and
nomadism, between espousing fundamentalist
notions of a pure, rooted and primordial cultural
476
identity or abandoning as politically regressive any
concept of cultural location. Doreen Massey’s
(1994) ‘progressive sense of place’ and its bifocal
vision of the constant and dynamic interconnec-
tions between local places on a global scale offers
one alternative. Yet discourses of hybridity in
geography tend to overlook the ways in which
ideas of authenticity and tradition can be invoked
in progressive politics, in favour of heady instances
of multi-media and multicultural mixing. And
again, discourses of hybridity can imply that,
before mixing, cultures are static, stable and
homogeneous affairs.
Gaelic placenames may be unlikely sources for
cultural reconciliation. Yet to overlook these
reworkings of the traditional is to overlook the
subtleties of culture. The examples discussed here
show both the theoretical and practical stalemate
of simply deconstructing ideas of belonging,
tradition or located cultures and the redundancy of
a polarized opposition between rootedness and
mobility. They challenge the binaries of ‘roots’ and
‘routes’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, cultural
purity and cultural hybridity, which constrain
critical debate in cultural studies and cultural
geography. In a context of cultural antagonism or
ethnic conflict, a clash of cultures cannot be solved
by asking people to abandon traditions. Instead of
senses of rootedness exacerbating cultural conflict,
located identities expressed through attachments
to place or tradition, or in this case placenames, can
help shape a plural sense of culture. This is not a
simple task; nor is it naively utopian to attend to
those moments in which alternative futures
become visible. Placenames here can stand as
metaphors for located traditions more generally. By
divorcing Gaelic placenames from an exclusively
Catholic identity, by emphasizing the diverse cul-
tural origins of placenames in Northern Ireland, or by
mediating between a desire for authenticity and
sense of a multicultural Irish history, in the different
sorts of names in Ireland or the meaningful but al-
ways mutable nature of an individual name, contem-
porary discourses of place and identity surrounding
these toponymic projects offer suggestions for re-
thinking the geographies of culture in Ireland and
theories of cultural geography. Linking language
and location, they mediate the tension within
post-colonialism between anti-colonialism and the
rejection of models of pure pre-colonial cultures.
While, on the one hand, anti-colonial perspec-
tives seem to endorse strategies of cultural
Catherine Nash
recovery and read projects to reinstate pre-colonial
names as positive practices of resistance and
recuperation, on the other hand, the problems of
ideas of origin and authenticity can inform a read-
ing of these projects as regressive returns to ideas
of cultural purity and preservation. The complexity
of placename discourses in Ireland points to the
inadequacy of both readings. The numerous
projects to collect and record placenames in Ireland
are neither simply ill-advised romantic searches for
cultural purity, nor forms of colonial trauma
therapy. At their most complex, these placename
projects challenge the kind of critical flourishes,
evident in responses to Translations, that celebrate
the cultural recovery of a colonized culture or
condemn placename research projects as manifes-
tations of wrong-headed nativist nostalgia. Like
language, placenames have been interpreted as
keys to neat and natural cultural categories, but
also like language, placename projects and policies
present opportunities to rethink culture as a
dynamic and social form of communication and
meaning-making. Placenames speak of a sense of
location and culture. At the same time the different
versions of a single placename and the different
cultural traditions they reflect can be read as point-
ers to cultural diversity and dynamism. It is this
sense of multicultural traditionalism and pluralis-
tic belonging that link attempts to reimagine cul-
ture and location. Identities and cultures can be
imagined as simultaneously mobile and located,
constantly being reshaped and at the same time
specific and situated. These stories of naming and
renaming places in Ireland offer directions towards
new post-colonial locations. This also involves a
progressive sense of history. Instead of obsessive
reiteration of the past as justification for the div-
isions of the present or historical amnesia and
wilful forgetting, the past can be remembered
differently. Despite criticisms of discourses of cul-
tural diversity in Northern Ireland (Rolston 1998),
they do not depend on a depoliticized sense of the
past, nor entail a neutralization of contemporary
resistance, but on a more complicated sense of the
political. Post-colonial histories require a recog-
nition of the wounds inflicted by the power-laden
discourses and practices of both colonialism and
nationalism, framed crucially by a shared sense
of the wider historical geographies of intercon-
nections, interdependencies and power relations
between people, structured though class and
gender as well as ethnicity (Hall C 1996). The
Irish placenames: post-colonial locations
imperative of the present, with its globalizing as
well as separatist impulses, is to enlist history and
geography creatively and critically to rethink,
rather than simply deconstruct, identity and
belonging.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the helpful comments made
by Miles Ogborn, Tim Robinson, Brian Graham,
Ron Martin and two anonymous referees, and for
the help and encouragement of Stephen Daniels
and Nicolas Alfrey when this paper first appeared
in a much earlier form.
Notes
1 The work of the campaign was traced in the minutes
of the Committee published in Ulster Local Studies
between 1976 and 1986: Ulster Local Studies 1977 3
23–6, 5 20–24, 1980 6 17–19, 1981 7 23–4, 1984 9 79,
1982 7 32–3, 1984 9 25–6 and 1986 9 274, and Minutes
of the General Meeting of the Federation for Ulster
Local Studies held at Hillgrove Hotel Monaghan on
Saturday 21 May 1977 (Ulster Local Studies 1977 3 27).
2 Townlands – a positive picture Ulster Local Studies
1990 12 41. See also Federation News Ulster Local
Studies 1986 9 274, where it was noted that the rural
areas of Scotland have no road numbering and farms
are identified by traditional name signs at lane-ends.
See also Minutes of the Fifth Annual General Meeting
of the Federation for Ulster Local Studies held in St
Davog’s Primary School Belleck Co Fermanagh on
Saturday 31 May 1980 Ulster Local Studies 1980 6 21,
where it was stated that:
in a list of addresses of some hundreds of farming
members of the Wool Marketing Board only seven
had road numbers. Of these six were in Northern
Ireland and this demonstrated that something was
being imposed here that was not in Great Britain.
3 Townlands Sub-Committee Ulster Local Studies 1989
11 12.
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