NOLLAIG O MURAILE,
A chara, - The Irish Times is to be commended on the feature (Weekend, July 13th) drawing attention to the recent welcome reissue by Four Courts Press of A Paper Landscape, John Andrews's magisterial study of the early days of the Ordnance Survey (OS) in Ireland. The piece, however, contained a number of factual errors and misunderstandings.
One might query, for instance, the statement that "the survey. . . was intended as a valuation of the land of Ireland". Rather it was to furnish the basis for the valuation later carried out by Richard Griffith. And what is meant by the statement that Duncan's map of Co Dublin was "an example of a map used to supply grand juries"? William Petty's Down Survey is misdated - is 1685 perhaps a misprint for 1658? There is a perplexing statement to the effect that "a serious awareness of \ problem was understood by Larcom". And the title of the second book by Dr Andrews cited in the article is Plantation Acres. . . (not Through Plantation Acres . . .) But it is in the panel relating to John O'Donovan (first professor of Celtic in this university) that the most egregious errors occur.
As the Kilkenny historian William Carrigan firmly established almost a century ago, O'Donovan's year of birth was 1806 not 1809; he was therefore aged 55, not 50 at the time of his death in December 1861. The statement that his "Catholic farming family was sufficiently comfortable that education was no difficulty" glosses over some of the real difficulties of his early life.
O'Donovan did attend a school in Waterford, but when he was 10 the family, unable to pay the rent on the farm in Attatteemore, had to move to a smaller farm, shortly before the father's untimely death, and in 1823 the lease on the second farm expired. It was only when his older brother, Michael, found employment in a Dublin shop that John was able to resume his education.
It was a myth that O'Donovan "visit some 62,000 townlands" (i.e. all the townlands in Ireland) while employed by the OS. He did visit 29 of the 32 counties - work on counties Antrim and Tyrone had already been completed by the time he set out on field work for the Survey in 1834, and he had not yet begun work on Co Cork by the time of the Topographical Department's rather sudden abolition in 1842.
To say that O'Donovan's "brief was compiling place-names" is to misunderstand the nature of his work. His task was to assess the historical attestations of place-names that his fellow-workers in the OS Topographical Department had abstracted from various sources and, having established the correct Irish form of each name - with the assistance of evidence collected from contemporary Irish-speaking informants - to recommend a suitable anglicised orthography. His "sourcing" of some 140,000 name-forms was not accomplished "on foot throughout Ireland". Much of his work on these names was carried out in Dublin libraries, such as those of TCD and the RIA, and in the OS office (Mountjoy, in Phoenix Park) or in George Petrie's house in North Great Charles Street.
It is incorrect to say that O'Donovan and O'Curry co-founded the Irish Archaeological Society in 1840. Although the IAS did provide an important platform for O'Donovan, issuing some of his most significant scholarly publications, the society was largely the brainchild of his friend and patron James Henthorn Todd. Morever, O'Donovan did not marry Eugene O'Curry's sister; rather, he married Mary Anne Broughton, sister of O'Curry's wife, Anne.
Finally, it is to misunderstand O'Donovan's importance in the story of Irish scholarship to refer to him simply as the "translator" of the Annals of the Four Masters. Another scholar, Owen Connellan had already published a translation of those Annals. What O'Donovan did was to furnish an edition - remarkably accurate by the standards of his time - of the original Irish text of the Annals, plus a mass of authoritative annotation of a scholarly quality never likely to be matched, let alone surpassed. Of his other works, his supplement to O'Reilly's Dictionary (published posthumously) would be considerably less significant than, say, his Tribes and Customs of Hy-Many (1843) and Hy-Fiachrach (1844), his edition of the Book of Rights (1847) or his Three Fragments of Irish Annals (1860).
In conclusion, it occurs to me that many of the errors just highlighted may derive from an uncritical use of the very inaccurate entries on O'Donovan, O'Curry, the townland, and a number of related topics, in the Oxford Companion to Irish History. Attention was drawn to the various shortcomings in these pieces in Ainm: Bulletin of the Ulster Place-Name Society, vol 8 (1998-2000), but a "revised" edition of the Companion has since appeared that fails to take cognisance of that critique. - Is mise,
NOLLAIG Ó MURAÍLE, Director, Northern Ireland Place-Name Project, Department of Irish and Celtic Studies, Queen's University, Belfast.
PS: It may be worth noting, in view of the laudatory references in the Weekend article to Brian Friel's celebrated play Translations, that Dr Andrews has published at least two articles in which he seeks to correct the play's various inaccuracies and distortions in relation to the history of the OS in Ireland.