The German for "An Lár" is Zentrum. The French is centre, the Italian is centro, the Spanish is centro, the US is center, writes Kevin Myers. The Canadian is centre and center. The English for "An Lár" is the centre. The Basque is xtzqlb.
Well, I think it is, though I could be wrong, because I just made it up: and with such a mind, one which works on principles that are directly inverse to those demanded by common sense, I could certainly get a director's job at the Centre of Irish Office Signage.
For that is a job which demands the opposite of what is expected from a comparable position in other countries. There, road-signs indicate names of places which are actually in use, and guide you towards those places. But not in Ireland, where even our new signs seem designed to confound.
I have often written about the sign on an entry point to the M50 ring road which indicates merely north or south, and with no other information, as if you automatically knew in which direction your destination lay. Equally, a series of ferry signs just outside Dun Laoghaire will in due course lead you not to Dun Laoghaire ferry port but to Dublin port. In pointing out these egregious assaults on logic, I never expected our public servants to improve the signage service for the public which employs them; and by God, I was not mistaken.
First principle
The first principle of signs in other countries - that they are designed to help the confused to get where they want to go - simply does not exist within that wretched body, the band of Irish sign-writers. Instead of going for clarity and simple language, they have turned our signs into a sort of Turner prize; and one can be forgiven for presuming that Tracey Amin was the designer behind Dublin Corporation's new family of signs around the capital, which are almost word-free, apart from the term for the city centre: "An Lár".
Now this is a term which nobody uses. Ever, ever, ever. It exists only on buses. If anybody ever actually asked for directions to An Lár from a member of the public, they'd be greeted with hilarity. The term has been a joke for decades, a darkly gruesome reminder of the ludicrous and meaningless official gestures towards the first national language.
But at least there was at least sometimes an accompanying text in English, so even if strangers - and that includes culchies and Northerners - in Dublin were baffled by the term An Lár, they could probably find some ancillary information in the local language, namely English, which could guide them to O'Connell Street.
Not with the new signs in the capital. They contain the words "An Lár" all alone as a guide to the where foreigners can find the city centre. And needless to say, the public-service imbeciles who chose to do this did not publicly consult anyone about how we wanted the city centre of Dublin named on our street signs; they just went ahead and revived the speechless, uncomprehending old bones of An Lár.
Stunning blow
So what point did they prove with this stunning blow for the first national language? That this is a nation of Gaels who gather at An Lár to exchange wisdom in Irish at its most mellifluous, with perhaps a spot of music and dance and traditional culture thrown in? Do these fools think that merely because street signs call a city centre by a name in Irish which no-one uses, would dream of using and will ever use, that the State is suddenly transformed into an Irish-speaking state? And do they think that misusing traffic signs in such a way is the reason the taxpayer employs them?
And how is it possible that Dublin Corporation could conjure up and implement its signage plan without referring the matter to Transport Minister Seamus Brennan or any other elected representative? How could it think it could spend public money like this? One can only conclude that the culture of power without consultation has become the governing ideology of city officials. These commissars, almost in an overnight coup, foisted on the public a series of incomprehensible signs throughout the capital. At best, these signs are a subject of low humour for natives, at worst are seriously confusing.
Road safety targets
Baffled drivers are dangerous drivers; and dangerous drivers are not just a danger to themselves. We have fallen hopelessly behind the road safety targets which we have been set by the EU. Instead of taking simple, straightforward action to make driving simpler and less challenging in a city which has a complex, almost incomprehensible street plan, Dublin Corporation has done quite the opposite. It has created signs which can only confuse outsiders, in order to serve some doomed, tendentious linguistic agenda. This is more than silly, and a misuse of public money: it is worse than mad: it is actually bad.
All Dublin Corporation had to do was the follow the universal example across the world, where you will never have any problem finding the centre of any town you visit: just about everywhere, the words on the signposts are all variants of the Latin word, centrum. The word is universal, and everyone knows what it means. In English it is centre.
But, of course, Dublin Corporation had to be different, so it has dug up the meaningless rotting corpse of the Irish word "lár" - go on, ask any teenager in Ballymun for directions to it. An Lár, needless to say, has different origins from "centrum", which has geometric roots. An Lar is connected with the soil, the ground. One of its forms, "ar lár", means "dead". Quite.