Stones, Names and Power: The Politics of Place Names in Irish Writing

Ireland wears its names in layers, and the layers never quite stop talking to one another. A road sign outside Galway announces both Bóthar na gCaorach and "Sheep Road" in the same breath. A Dubliner might speak of the Liffey in English and An Life in Irish without noticing the pivot between them. These small linguistic crossings are not idle folklore; they are the residue of conquest, plantation, famine, emigration, and the long, stubborn survival of a vernacular tongue that the English state once tried to replace. Writers from the Gaelic Revival onward have understood that to name a place is to claim, contest, or mourn it, and that the politics of place names in Irish writing reaches far beyond cartography into the architecture of memory itself.

Howard G. Franklin knew this terrain well. In a recent post on irish-music-as-a-map-for-narrative-pace, he explored the way song structures an Irish landscape, and the same instinct shapes his novels. Readers in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane often write to his archive about how the toponyms in his prose feel like a quiet second language, even to those who have never set foot in County Clare. That response, that sense of being addressed by a name one has only ever read, is exactly the political and emotional work that the best Irish writing asks of its audience.

The layered cartography of an island

To stand in any Irish town is to read a palimpsest. The Ordnance Survey maps of the nineteenth century, drawn by English-speaking cartographers who were instructed to "fix" Irish names, often anglicised spellings in ways that scrambled pronunciation, dropped syllables, or substituted English words for Irish ones. A river became "Blackwater" instead of An Abhainn Mhór. A mountain became "Mount Leinster" rather than Sliabh Leinster. These changes look minor on a page, but they altered how a name was spoken for generations, and the act of speaking a name differently is the act of seeing a place differently.

Writers responded to this cartographic violence with quiet subversion. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893, encouraged the recovery of original Irish names. Poets, playwrights, and folklorists insisted that the anglicised maps told only half a story. Even today, a visitor to Cork will find bilingual street signs that quietly undo the Victorian overlay, restoring the Irish to the same brass plaque that still bears its English twin. It is in those brass plaques, half and half, that the politics of place names becomes most visible, and most contested.

Where some of the layered names sit today

• Dublin / Baile Átha Cliath – the capital, whose Irish name translates as "town of the hurdled ford," a reference to a Viking-era crossing.
• Galway / Gaillimh – drawn from the river that runs through it, the Irish form retaining the older Gaelic root.
• Limerick / Luimneach – the anglicised form, like so many port cities, compresses a softer, longer Irish original.
• Killarney / Cill Airne – "church of the sloes," a literal translation of the Irish.
• The River Shannon / Abhainn na Sionainne – its Irish name is older than any English record of it, with roots that may predate Celtic settlement.
• Sligo / Sligeach – "shelly place," named for the abundance of oyster and mussel shells along its estuary.

Toponymy as survival

To learn a place name in Irish is, often, to refuse its colonial packaging. After the Famine, when Irish-speaking districts were depopulated, the maps drawn in English doubled as instruments of forgetting. A family leaving for Boston or Sydney carried the Irish name of their town as a private possession, while the official record elsewhere had already accepted the English form. This is why Droichead na Bóinne, the crossing at the River Boyne, matters far more than its tourism brochures suggest; it is a hinge between two versions of the same island.

Contemporary Irish writing, particularly since the Troubles, has treated toponymy as a measure of cultural survival. In Northern Ireland, street signs, murals, and official maps become arguments about who belongs where. A bilingual kerbstone in Belfast can be as polemical as a poem by Ciaran Carson. A pub in Derry might bear the name "Derry" on one wall and "Doire" on another, and the choice between them is never neutral. To call the place Derry is to call it by the name that Catholic residents have used for centuries; to call it Londonderry is to invoke the seventeenth-century charter of a city built partly on confiscated land. Writers have explored this hinge again and again, because the hinge is the place.

Heaney's bogs, Friel's kitchens, and the politics of naming

Few poets have understood the loaded ground beneath a name as Seamus Heaney did. His bog poems do not only describe a landscape; they preserve the linguistic strata that colonisation tried to bury. "Bogland" speaks of a turf-cutters' world where the Irish-language placenames survive in the mouths of older relatives, almost as fossils. In "Anahorish," Heaney names a small, otherwise unmarked stretch of road in County Derry, and the act of naming it in English, with its Irish root still audible, becomes an act of devotion. The poem is, in a sense, a small restoration project.

Brian Friel, working in drama rather than lyric, made the politics of place names central to plays like Translations and The Communication Cord. Friel's characters stand in a hedge-school room while an English officer maps their town into an English-grid future. The audience watches a name being crossed out, replaced, and "improved," and the violence of that bureaucratic gesture is the violence of the play. Friel knew, as every Irish writer of his generation knew, that renaming a field is the first step toward owning it, and that to refuse the new name is to refuse the new order. His work has been widely taught in Australian universities, particularly in Melbourne's theatre studies programs, where the question of how a language is mapped onto a place resonates with questions about Aboriginal place names and the long struggle to have them recognised on official signs.

Voices in the Irish toponymic conversation

• Seamus Heaney – "Anahorish," "Bogland," and the North as a sounding-board for older Gaelic layers.
• Brian Friel – Translations, in which the renaming of Irish towns becomes a stage for cultural erasure.
• Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill – writes in Irish about Kerry placenames that map onto private memory and immigrant longing.
• Ciaran Carson – Belfast place names, drawn from French, Scots, Gaelic, and English, treated as multilingual palimpsests.
• Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin – poems that walk a city block and recover the Irish buried inside the English.
• John Montague – cross-border poems in which the county itself becomes a contested syllable.

The Australian reader and the distance of place

From the vantage of a Brisbane bookshop or a Sydney book club, Irish place names arrive already freighted with distance. Australian readers tend to meet Ireland through memoir, lyric, and family story, long before they meet it on a map. The politics of place names in Irish writing therefore works on Australian readers in a particular way: it offers a vocabulary for thinking about belonging, exile, and the right to name a place. For readers of Irish descent in Perth or Hobart, those questions are not abstract; they sit alongside their own inheritance of Aboriginal names that were anglicised or removed, and the parallels are not lost on writers like Kim Scott or Alexis Wright, who have done similar work with Australian landscapes.

The Australian book market, with its strong appetite for memoir and travel writing, has welcomed Irish writers whose sense of place is inseparable from their sense of language. Franklin's own An Irish Experience sits on this shelf, joining a tradition in which the journey through Ireland is also a journey through its many names. An Australian reader who picks up the book in a Melbourne laneway bookshop will find, perhaps unexpectedly, that the placenames in it begin to act like a quiet second text, the one that the English versions of the map have spent two centuries trying to obscure.

How the conversation continues

The political work of place names in Irish writing is far from finished. Bilingual signage continues to expand, and debates over the visibility of Irish in everyday life remain vigorous. New generations of writers, including those working in the revived Gaeltacht communities, are re-naming streets, parks, and digital maps in ways that rebalance a record long tilted toward English. Readers, too, are learning to read with two ears at once, holding the anglicised and the Irish versions of a name in the same attention.

For Australian readers in particular, the conversation offers a chance to think across oceans. The same instinct that insists on recognising An Corcaigh beside Cork also insists on recognising Uluru alongside Ayers Rock, or on hearing the older names of rivers in the Pilbara alongside their colonial replacements. Irish writing has long modelled the patient, poetic work of recovery; the question now is whether readers elsewhere will follow its example. To begin that listening is to step into a story that is, quite literally, about the ground beneath us.

If you are new to Howard G. Franklin's work, his novels and memoirs offer a generous entry point into the layered geography of Ireland. His novel Gideon's Children and his travelogue An Irish Experience are available through Australian booksellers, and his critical reception in Spanish-language literary journals offers a useful counterpoint to the Anglophone conversation. Begin with whichever name calls to you, and let the rest follow.