Perhaps most people who took an interest in US politics until recently assumed that John Kerry was an Irish-American, and for two reasons: firstly, like most Irish politicians, he had absolutely no convictions, being content to blather empty platitudes; and secondly, his name: Kerry.
But that should have been proof he wasn't Irish. Irish names are rarely toponymics. Surnames such as "Wexford" and "Malahide" are English inventions. The only person called "Dublin" that I've ever heard of is an English footballer of West Indian origins.
James Galway seems to be an exception, but MacLysaght - in The Surnames of Ireland - contends that that particular name in Ulster is a toponymic derived from the Scottish town of Galloway. Which leaves - what? Kilkenny, as in Ossie Kilkenny, and just about no one else. Since Kilkenny was for long an old English city, perhaps the English habit of naming someone after the place he had come from caused an Ossie ancestor to become a Kilkenny.
But that's it, just about. No one is called Donegal or Lisdoonvarna or Cashel or Cahir or Drogheda, though English people are called Chester, York and Leicester, or have one of those names ending in -ford, -by, -ham, -fort, -thorpe, -thwaite, -ton or -borough. Nor is the use of the toponymic solely an English device. There are Isaiah Berlin and Emile Berliner (Irving Berlin was actually "Baline"). Marseilles was the surname of Hans Joachim, a famous German Luftwaffe fighter ace descended from Huguenots. There are people called Lyons in both France and Britain. I presume, without knowing, that there are people called de Calais and de Nice.
But this didn't happen in Ireland. Many of our names are derived from descriptions of their original owners - for example, and at random, from MacLysaght, Marron probably comes from the Irish "mear", meaning quick or lively, and Hallissey, from áilgheas, meaning eagerness. An extraordinary number are either patronymics - the Mac names, which are usually based on the father's given name, or are generic - the Ó names. Many combine the two traditions of personal characteristic and of subsequent generic group, as in O'Sullivan, the primary root of which is derived from "súil", eye.
But far less common than in English are vocational names - all those -wrights, -ers and of course -smiths. Smith (or rather Smithson) certainly has its Irish equivalent in McGowan, though neither has managed to acquire the exotic kudos of their Italian equivalent, Ferrari, nor their well-named distant German cousin, Messerschmitt, literally, knife-smith.
In general, our ancient name-smiths seem to have preferred names based on personal characteristics and kinship links. Outsiders were simply called as much - by names like Gallagher, O'Halloran and Walsh, which all seem based on the not very welcoming concept of reminding a stranger that a stranger is what he is, and remains such forever. Ah, how familiar that is: in other words, blow-ins.
Our ancestors were far more concerned with kinship and clan than with vocations or locations. Our politics still reflects that. Most rural TDs will know the names of a very large proportion of their constituents, and will agree with them that the acquisition of planning permissions, wherever they want them, is far more important that the preservation of the landscape itself.
"A sense of place" is often (and smugly) said to be one of the defining characteristics of the Irish people, even as we cover the fairest of places with tens of thousands of bungalows. For no "sense of place" is in the least evident in the way we allow strip development outside every town and village, let one-off houses turn many coastal roads into extended eyesores.
This wanton disregard for a place and its visual and environmental sensitivities merely reflects the political - if subconscious - priority we accord to kinship. Planning permissions are not merely ways of giving a financial helping hand to a family member; they also serve as geographical bonds. These are culturally far more important than the physical beauty of the structural community to which they will be attached, and to which they will inevitably do terrible damage.
Almost any village in England is protected from the gross additions which have done - and are continuing to do - so much ruin to small Irish towns and villages by clientelist politics and the planning permissions which are its currency. But unlike such unnaturally protected villages, the populations of most Irish communities will probably know one another, and engage with one another, in an altogether more vigorous way than in England.
It would be wonderful if you could combine the architectural qualities of Moreton-in-the-Marsh or Bourton-on-the-Water with the Irish passion for kinship, but of course the two are mutually exclusive. The glories of the Cotswold villages, with which nothing in Ireland can remotely compare, have survived simply because the communities there, and their politicians, were prepared to see young people leave and live elsewhere rather than allow the beauty of the area be devalued by excessive or insensitive building.
We have traditionally been spared such harsh decisions. Endemic economic failure since the Famine meant inevitably there was little or no population pressure on our rural infrastructure. But now, for the first time in our history, people can afford to stay where they were born, and kinship ties are triumphing over the environment. Complain all you will: as our a-toponymical names suggest, it is all part of an apparently unchanging national characteristic.
(Footnote: the Kerry fortune comes from his Heinz wife. Appropriately enough, Heinz, in German, means a trestle for making hay).