This is not a simple task. Following the Ordnance Survey around the State to record, in detailed fashion, the placenames of Ireland takes a lot of patience and a lot of scholarship. But the Placenames Commission - An Coimisiun Logainmneacha - is getting there, slowly but surely.
Following the roots of placenames can be an arduous task both in the field and in the library, but it is also illuminating and instructive and can make a day in the country so much more pleasurable.
As our hinterland changes dramatically with the proliferation of housing estates, usually completed with what the builders perceive to be upwardly mobile British-sounding names, it has become all the more important to record and describe the names given to places by our ancestors. There is an abundance of housing estate names that bear no resemblance to the original placename - six years ago I wrote about a seminar organised by An Coimisiun Logainmneacha on this very subject. Coming back to it again at such a remove, the files reminded me of an important contribution made by Prof Donncadh O Corrain of UCC. In a paper entitled "A future for Irish placenames", he had this to say:
"The purveyors of Tiffany Downs and the like - speculative builders and half-educated property consultants - are in no way qualified to be left with cultural decisions of this significance. We require a policy and policy must be based on knowledge and purpose." The case of the Tiffany Downs estate in Cork particularly exercised the professor and he went on to take apart the builder's decision to adopt the name.
Charles Lewis Tiffany, he explained, was the jeweller who established the famous New York emporium frequented by the rich and famous when they needed a bauble or two. When Truman Capote wrote his collection of short stories, Break- fast at Tiffany's, in 1958, the diamond store's name entered popular parlance, signifying not one but many rungs up the ladder if you could go there to buy in the first place. Prof O Corrain was convinced in his paper that the upmarket tag which characterised the Tiffany brand name was what attracted the builder to it.
He went on: "This, of course, is where the builder or his adviser got it wrong, but I doubt whether either of them would have the remotest suspicion of its origin . . . It is an old name that derives from early medieval French, Tifanie. The French borrowed it from ecclesiastical Latin, Theofania, and that, in turn, is a borrowing from Greek, Theofaneia - a word found in the work of fourth-century Christian writers and meaning `the manifestation of God to man'. "
Having dealt with that aspect of the estate name, he noted that Tiffany Downs lies in low wetlands southwards on the Cork/Bandon Road. If the builders thought that downs had something to do with lowlands, they could not have been more wrong, he added. The reason for this was that in Old English, from where it derived, the word was "dun", a hill. It had a second meaning, giving it as an open expanse of elevated land or upland chalk territory used for grazing sheep.
Pressing home the point, Prof O Corrain said: "The English expression `dale and down' actually means lowland and upland." Pretentious name-giving by builders, he told his audience, was nothing more than chasing after grandeur and respectability in the belief that fashionable anglicisations would meet the need. Ignorance was at work on the building sites where some research could have reflected the real history of these places, endowing them with names that would mean something in terms of an area's past.
So what is happening with the work of the Placenames Commission? When I last checked, the work was gaining ground, although at no great pace. Those involved never expected it to be a 200-yards dash, more a marathon. In painstaking fashion, the staff of the commission, now with computers to make life a little easier, are beginning to make inroads.
Research is also under way at UCC which will lead to the production of a historical dictionary of Irish placenames. The only previous one was produced by Edmund Hogan, a Jesuit, in 1910. He was from Great Island in Cobh - once Queenstown, for the placename conscious - but his dictionary is outdated.
Prof Padraig O Riain, of the department of medieval Irish at UCC, is heading a team which includes Dr Kevin Murray, Dr Diarmuid O Murchadha and Dr Tina Hellmuth and a number of postgraduates. The Higher Education Authority has grantaided the work over a three-year period, although it may take a decade to bring the final volume to our bookshelves.
However, the UCC tome in a staggered fashion should reach us by early next year. More will follow until the completed volume is available.
Prof O Riain says that "To be named is to exist" is an old Irish saying. The subject of Irish placenames has certainly lived up to these sentiments over the past weeks. First, to judge by the lively debate on Liveline, the people of Knock were not a bit pleased to find the Irish name of the town, Cnoc Mhuire, officially replaced by An Cnoc.
Then, according to newspaper reports, a judge at a local district court in Dublin threw out a large number of traffic summonses because he deemed the name Swords on them insufficient to describe the place of that name near Dublin. He declared, wrongly as it happens, that the Townland Index lists several places named Swords. Intriguing, but what a happy moment for those in the body of the court who may never have bothered about placenames.
The placenames work, though, hasn't all been left to the expertise of academics. There are plenty of enthusiastic and knowledgeable lay experts involved. Bruno O'Donoghue's Parish Histories and Placenames of West Cork is a fine example of what can be achieved.
Another is the elderly gentleman supping his pint in what I believe to be one of Ireland's most interesting pubs, Nead an Fhiolair, The Eagle's Nest in English, in the village of Nadd, north Cork.
One day the gentleman in question took me outside and showed me where the eagle's nest used to be. Nead an Fhiolair meant something to him because the name had travelled down the generations. The old pub, spanning centuries, had fixed its point and was aptly named, even if the great eagles were long since gone.
The placenames must be preserved. We have to be able to hand on the authentic records. I cannot imagine a semi-state body being set up in the years ahead to explain names like Cedar Downs when there are no cedars and no downs, or Kensington Close, when neither name is applicable. Preserve the placenames - preserve us from the ridiculous.