Some people are extraordinary indeed. Take the case of Dingle, for example. There is a plan to exhibit the name of Dingle in Kerry on notice boards and direction boards as An Daingean. And people are arguing for and against, if and maybe.
The name Dingle sounds like something out of Dickens in his more outrageously sentimental days. Remember his Dingley Dell which was graced by the presence and adventures of the balloon-shaped Mr Pickwick and his companions? No wonder some people want to call the place An Daingean.
And some other people are objecting to this. In other words, some people are objecting to having a place called by its own proper name. They say tourists will not be able to find their way there if the name is changed.
Changed? It is simply the place getting its name back. But you know how it is about names, some people want to take even your name away from you.
Some folk will remember being stopped on our streets by foreign mercenaries some years back and being asked to translate their names into English. Mac Siachais, mate? Wot's that in English now, and howja spell that name?
Tourists would need to be very rude and uncultivated people not to be able to read a map or a notice board and realise where they are. Tourists have moved successfully from Berchesgaden to Llanelli and none of them was lost or suffered from exposure resulting from inability to know where they were.
No, the tourists who are unhappily lost are those who are in the wastelands, in the desert, up the mountains and on the sea where there are no direction boards at all.
Tourists have a great deal of sense and even British soccer fans have been able to find their way through a multitude of cities while peering – keep the 'r' in that word please – round every foreign corner in an alcoholic haze, so what difficulty would sober tourists have in finding their way to, in and from An Daingean? Tourists are clever people. And to say they would be unable to cope with An Daingean – even having always been used to Dingle – would be to insult their intelligence.
However, it seems that Mr O Cuiv, the responsible minister in the government down there in Dublin, wants Gaeltacht place names to be simply in the Irish language. And An Daingean is part of the Kerry Gaeltacht. Other people want such names in two languages, Dingle and An Daingean. The merry tourist on his or her way might be tempted to go along the road – in a jaunting car presumably since we must keep tourists happy – singing "My heart (or something ) goes Dingle Daingean..." That is not a happy thought.
However, much of the argument comes down to business. Much of it also may come down to the touching of forelocks. From the point of view of business, certainly tourists want to go to Dingle. They have always been used to going to Dingle. Dingle calls them musically and fishingly and dancingly and courtingly, and culturally of course. What would An Daingean say to them? Business people are afraid that if the name were given to them as An Daingean tourists would panic, shy like frightened horses and go away. But surely this is hardly likely. People will find their way to the music, fishing, dancing, courting and culture grounds through any number of signposts, some of them even pointing in the wrong direction entirely and giving the wrong distance.
The forelock touching thing is, of course, more serious. When in doubt choose a sort of, well.. a kind of, well... not to put too fine a point on it, an Englishy sort of name. You know what I mean. Remember Dickens in Dingley Dell.
Remember all the lovely English language place names presented to us before, like Londonderry, for example, now where would you get nicer than that? Newtownmountkennedy, sure isn't that name just gorgeous? You would not want to change Newtownmountkennedy into something sounding as Irish as Clos Cnoc na Foinse now would you?
Of course the question then arises, if you want names in English, why not set them up in French as well? And Italian. And German. To suit all those German tourists, more of whom probably follow the footsteps of St Colmcille than Irish people do? Is it because more English-speaking people come to Ireland? They have no trouble finding Fuengirola, so why find it hard to get to and through An Daingean?
It's like the argument some people use that they must have religious services in English in the Gaeltacht because otherwise English speakers might get confused and find themselves tongue-tied in face of the Almighty of a Sunda'.
Such good people would not mind in the least attending religious services in Madrid which, good heavens, were all in Spanish. No problem. Nice, of course, when there was that universal Catholic language, what's this it was now, ah yes, Latin, when we could all enjoy the sounds of the words and catch the meanings as they flew by because we had been doing it for decades.
The argument about An Daingean and Dingle is going on hot and heavy at the moment, and those of us who dearly wish we could use the language fluently stand by in wonder at how casually people who can use it fluently treat it so casually – so people have their choice of direction signs, all in Irish, all in English, both Irish and English, or Irish, English, German, Spanish, Chinese, Welsh, Ulster Scots and so forth.
Let's hope the argument is settled with dignity, wisdom, courtesy, profit, and, of course, with economy of notice boards and paint, which is also part of the problem when dealing with bilingual, trilingual, quadrilingual, multilingual signage.
