Madam - Liam Ó Cuinneagáin (February 7th) is absolutely right. The majority of our place-names, as commonly used in English bear no relationship to their original Irish meanings. They are merely crude, phonetic bastardisations of the Irish words. They exist because some land-grabbing ignoramuses couldn't get their tongues around the cadences of our Irish pronunciation.
Every reader of this journal will, no doubt, be able to quote examples from his own locality, as indeed I can.
Corcaigh we call Cork, which is bad enough, but it gets worse. Cill is known as Kill and my own family homeland of Cill Bhrotáin ends up as Kilbrittain. How many tourists, I wonder, think that this peaceful and delightful parish is a hotbed of revolutionary fervour? Then we go from the farcical to the embarrassing. A foreign visitor, after perusing her English dictionary, recently asked me to explain the connection between the charming village of Ballinaspittle and saliva!
It's time to start a concerted campaign to restore to us our Irish place-names and to abandon (and what about my home-town of Bandon?) this ludicrous legacy of foreign occupation and oppression, as any proud nation has the right to do. The Poles, after all, define their town of Ozwiencim by that name, rather than the former name of Auschwitz. - Yours, etc.,
SÉAMUS D. O'HEA, South Terrace, Cork.