I remember once being shushed by my mother for saying my name out loud in a supermarket near the Shankill Road. I was still in primary school and the ink wasn’t long dry on the Good Friday Agreement; a turbo-loyalist area wasn’t necessarily the best place for me to be jangling an enormous brightly-coloured keyring with a name like Gráinne emblazoned on it (figuratively speaking, since anyone who grew up with an Irish name knows what a rare, semi-mythical phenomenon it was to find personalised merch for our demographic). At age seven, I had no inhibitions about announcing myself to a west Belfast frozen foods aisle at a time of still-smouldering sectarian tension. Now, at age twenty-seven, I get heart palpitations when a barista asks what name to put on my latte.
When I moved to England three years ago, I fell into the habit of saying my own name with a tone of apology. I got used to just responding to whatever mangled collection of syllables people decided to call me. I had internalised the notion that Irish names, as comic-actor-turned-Twitter-curmudgeon John Cleese put it, looked ‘like deliberate attempts to mislead innocent people’. Cleese asking Irish TV presenter Síle Seoige, ‘Why don’t you Irish spell your names properly?’ is the kind of casual paddywhackery I learned to expect from people in England. Just last week, another Twitter user made a comment about the spelling of the name Caoimhe and Cleese responded, ‘No wonder the Irish never had an empire’ (as if the fact that Ireland doesn’t have a savage colonial history should be a great source of national shame).
Cleese’s most recent nose-thumbing closely coincided with an unrelated tweet by American screenwriter Jessica Ellis, which read:
‘Periodic reminder that there was an Irish woman pirate in the 1500s who captured her own husband’s castle and threw him out and dominated the seas England didn’t go near her territory for decades after she died and I HAVE A PILOT ABOUT THIS NO-ONE HAS BOUGHT YET.’ – Jessica Ellis (@baddestmamajama)
Ellis’s post (now deleted) refers to Gráinne Ní Mháille (also known as Gráinne Mhaol, sometimes anglicised as Grace O’Malley), a sixteenth-century Irish pirate who once met with Elizabeth I and refused to bow to her, claiming not to recognise her as the queen of Ireland. ‘This sounds amazing,’ enthused one Twitter user, ‘please tell me an actual Irish woman is playing her and her name is Gráinne not Grace’. Ellis replied, ‘If it ever gets purchased this will be taken under strong consideration. To be fair if the show is done in English, Grace makes more sense.’
I would love to see a TV show about Gráinne Mhaol. What I don’t love is the idea of someone saying one minute that the story of a unique and influential historical figure deserves to be told, and the next minute planning to dilute her Irish heritage in the interest of making her more palatable to mainstream audiences. Twitter users responding to Jessica Ellis pointed out that no effort was made to simplify the elaborate character names from Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, yet their viewers seemed to master the pronunciations without difficulty. Ellis responded to one individual: ‘Look the show is unsold as of this moment, how about you save the lecture for shows that actually exist in any viewable format’ – as if to politely ask that someone not pimp out your history in a way that erases important parts of your language and culture makes you a monumental buzzkill.
I am categorically not out to police the historical accuracy of TV costume dramas. (I will always choose the anachronistic glamour of The Tudors over Wolf Hall, no questions asked.) The Irish Twitter infantry didn’t gallop to defend Gráinne Mhaol from being rechristened Grace O’Malley because we’re all sticklers for uncompromised historical authenticity. People objected to the anglicisation of Gráinne because this perpetuates the idea that Irish names need to be adapted or translated to make them accessible outside of Ireland. The Irish language is perceived as some kind of obscure backwater vernacular that no non-Irish speaker should be expected to make an effort to pronounce or understand; we’re asked what’s it the Irish for? by people who assume our names are the estranged word-children of English equivalents rather than having identity and meaning in their own right.
No-one should feel like they have to adjust their name so it sits easier in someone else’s mouth. Gráinne isn’t the Irish for anything. (My mother always told me it came from grá meaning love, whereas gráin means horror in old Middle Irish, so other sources interpret Gráinne as ‘she who inspires terror’. I like to think it’s both.) It’s not a weird spelling or a deliberate attempt to mislead innocent people. Grow the fuck up; it’s a great name. Gráinne Mhaol held her own as a leader, a rebel, a queen; I hold up queues in Starbucks. It’s a start.
Cover photo by Khara Woods on Unsplash
good strong words 