Here’s an idea. Let’s dename Ireland. I mean, who among us wants to live in a country called Anger Land? It gives the wrong impression of us, entirely. We’re a friendly people with a hundred thousand welcomes. The country’s name is a stain on us all. It dredges up visions of purple-faced pikemen from the past. So let’s ditch it. All it takes is the squiggle of a pen and a few million euro for the new letterhead.
But what to call it instead? Hibernia, maybe? No – too close to “hibernus”, the Latin for wintry, and we don’t want to put off the spendy tourists. How about Cathleen Ní Houlihán? That’s a joke, right? Sure, you couldn’t be giving it a woman’s name. It’s common knowledge that, if a great edifice requires a name, a man’s one is your only man.
Take Dublin Airport. Some bright spark decided it warranted a catchier moniker. He cast an eye over the capital and it landed on Portland Row, and Troy Parrott specifically. “Bygob, I’ve got it,” he declared. “We’ll name it after the lad who brought us great joy by scoring a dose of football goals, albeit without a trophy to show for them yet.”
No, no, not the woman from further along the Row, Kellie Harrington, who brought home a brace of Olympic gold medals.
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Over Dev’s dead body will a sportsman get the honour, thought a Fianna Fáiler in Leinster House. Now there’s an actual Oireachtas Bill proposing to rename the airport after one of that party’s deceased leaders. Seán Lemass was the taoiseach who waved his magic wand and turned Ireland into an economic miracle. He’ll fit nicely, until someday someone remembers he used to be a gun-toting guerrilla in the revolutionary years.
This denaming lark is the business. It’s better than going to confession. When the guilt gets too much, reinvent. Not even an Act of Contrition or three Hail Marys need be said. The real beauty is that, as well as purging your own guilt, you can purge everyone else’s too, whether they like it or not. Some Carrickfergus residents had their souls laundered last month when Prince Andrew Way took the banishment due Mister Mountbatten-Windsor for his sins.
Will plan to rename Dublin Airport after Seán Lemass fly?
Ireland has been slow to name its airports after people. Streets and housing estates, yes, but as Ronan McGreevy points out, the State is more inclined to honour those who died for Ireland rather than those who lived for it.A Bill to rename Dublin Airport after former taoiseach Seán Lemass has been brought forward in the Dáil.Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan and John Casey.
Sometimes, the guilt by association is an over-reach. In the latest round of deshaming-by-denaming, a group of Dublin city councillors stretched all the way across to the Mediterranean Sea to rope in a long-departed president of Israel. Chaim Herzog was born in Belfast before partition and grew up in Dublin, a son of Ireland’s chief rabbi. Herzog Park in Rathgar was named in his memory three decades after his own family was instrumental in establishing the Eamon de Valera Memorial Forest Park in Israel. Aptly, it stands near the Sea of Galilee where Jesus Christ walked on water.
“I see in this planting of trees in president de Valera’s distinguished name a fitting expression of the traditional friendship between the Irish and the Jewish peoples,” said former Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol when the park opened. His political adviser, Yaakov Herzog, was Chaim’s brother.
The group of councillors who want the Herzog name obliterated argue that Chaim used to be a Zionist paramilitary and, thus, a bad ‘un. As if Dev was sitting at home knitting geansais on Easter Monday when the freedom fighters in Boland’s Mills were shooting at advancing British soldiers.
[ Herzog Park denaming ‘will be seen as anti-Semitic’, says TaoiseachOpens in new window ]
Few would deny that the state of Israel operates vicious apartheid against Palestinians and has committed crimes against humanity against the people of Gaza. But those abhorred by the genocide of at least 70,000 Gazans by the Israel Defense Forces since October 2023, and the continuing confiscation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, have been ill served by the self-righteous councillors. For their virtue-signalling in attempting to dename a Dublin Park has succeeded only in strengthening Israel’s hand.
Thanks to them, the Occupied Territories Bill is likely to get shoved further down the Dáil’s legislative to-do list. The Irish Government has been subjected to a blizzard of US and Israeli disinformation designed to bully it into shelving the Bill. Its non-appearance a year since the general election has raised suspicions that the Government may already have been bending under international pressure even before this holier-than-thou fandango fanned fresh but false allegations that Ireland is anti-Semitic.
Ireland has become “a scene of raging anti-Semitism”, according to Chaim’s son, Michael, a former ambassador to Washington and a brother of Israel’s current president.
The only thing achieved by the councillors’ gratuitous move – which would have saved zero Palestinian lives – is to hand detractors of the Occupied Territories Bill a propaganda grenade that could kill it off.
Deshaming-by-denaming comes with an inherent fault line. It’s called selectivity. One person’s terrorist is another person’s liberator. If the Herzog name is incompatible with Ireland’s geographical architecture, how much longer can the John F Kennedy Arboretum in Wexford and the gamut of eponymous drives, ways, quays, parks and avenues withstand JFK’s feckless libido? Ought we to dename the Barack Obama Plaza after that president’s confession that he mislaid his Irish apostrophe? Should Iran and Italy dename their Bobby Sands Streets in Tehran and Florence on the same pretext the councillors argue against Herzog Park? Don’t the Spanish realise their Margaret Thatcher Plaza in Madrid is ice down the spine of many Irish and British visitors to their beautiful capital?
Before setting our deshaming sights far abroad, the denaming brigade might conduct a recce of our own patch of Earth. Are they aware that Cromwells Fort Grove in Co Wexford preserves the memory of the Most Hated Person in Ireland Ever who led a massacre of 2,000 inhabitants of that very same county?
If we’re to start local, Borris-in-Ossory might be as good a launch pad as any. What say ye to Volodymyr-in-Ossory?
