DRIVING through north Donegal we noticed that some of the road signs were defaced.
One was a sign to the town of Churchill.
It might be easy to suppose that someone was annoyed that a town in Donegal had the same name as Winston Churchill who had ordered murderous reprisals against the Irish for attacks by the IRA during the War of Independence.
In fact, it has nothing to do with him.
Another sign at Gortahork, inside the Gaeltacht area had one English name on it, for Dunfanaghy which is outside the Gaeltacht. Someone had drawn a white line across it, leaving it legible but making the point that no English words should be there.
Not that Dunfanaghy is an English word. It’s an anglicisation of an Irish phrase, Dún Fionnachaidh, meaning 'fort of the fair field’.
That’s a more respectful treatment of the original Gaelic name than Churchill is of Mín an Lábáin which Google translates as The Laban’s Finest.
I took more notice of these defacings than I might normally have done. They are fairly common in Northern Ireland. Often someone scores out the London of Londonderry.
We were on our way to Dunlewey, Dhún Lúiche, Lugh’s Fort, to see a performance of Brian Friel’s play Translations, to be staged in a community centre at the foot of Errigal mountain.
This was part of Friel Days, A Homecoming, a celebration of the works of Brian Friel on the tenth anniversary of his death. Staged readings of his plays were being held in informal locations close to where the action was set.
Translations imagines a hedge school in Donegal, before the famine, where British soldiers mapping the area change local Gaelic names into forms easier for them to pronounce.
Friel engages with the idea that changing the names of places is a violation of a local culture, but he creates different perspectives on that idea. There is the school master who is appalled. One of his sons who works for the army doesn’t see the problem. A girl falls in love with a soldier and wants to learn English.
Two days later we went to Sion Mills in County Tyrone to see another of Friel’s plays addressing similar ideas. In The Home Place a scientist has a theory that the innate character of a people can be understood through their physical features and sets about measuring skulls and body proportions, treating the Irish peasantry as mere objects of study.
Again there are the contrasting perspectives.
The drunken school master arrives and expounds his own theory that the one who truly defined the Irish was Thomas Moore, the great poet and lyricist. Again we have the idea that there is a natural innate Irishness readily violated by the crass British who can never access - though some may yearn to - the deeper feelings of a native people.
In this play too, Friel creates a dramatic discourse around these ideas which includes rejection of them.
He was writing at the time of the Northern Irish Troubles and in both plays depicts the militants as retaining a kind of moral hold over the native Irish who don’t support them, are embarrassed by them, but are ultimately more protective of them than of their English friends and associates.
While I was out hopping from one improvised theatre to another I saw another echo of Friel’s concerns in an article in The Spectator magazine. It referenced me.
Douglas Murray names me as one of ‘a few brave writers’ who rise above a self-indulgent Irish victim status. I’d thank him to leave my name out of his silly theorising.
His argument was in keeping with the crass generalisations of the soldiers in Translations and the scientist in The Home Place, that there is a consistent and general Irish psyche and that it is, of its nature, contemptible to British eyes.
I take it he bases his presumption of ideological fellowship with me on my critiques of the paramilitary cultures here, though disdain for the gunmen and bombers has always been fairly general.
Murray’s main target is the writer Sally Rooney, author of Normal People and Intermezzo. Murray is attacking Rooney because she has declared her support for Palestine Action, a group legally classed as terrorist because it uses vandalism as an instrument of protest against British military aid to Israel.
He says that she ‘appears to have been well-marinaded in the prejudices of her native land’.
This is bizarre nonsense.
He accuses the Irish of singling out the state of Israel for ‘unusual vilification’. This while he singles out Ireland for what I’d call ‘unusual vilification’. Many, many countries and people have criticised Israel, including the International Criminal Courtthe United Nations and the British Foreign Secretary.
Singling out the Irish from among them betrays an unwarranted prejudice.
Murray is as eccentric and hopefully as rare as the defacers of Donegal road signs because they can’t bear to see English language text on the corner of a boreen through the heathered hills.
Both might have wandered out of a Friel play or provided him with material for another if he was still with us.
Malachi O’Doherty’s novel on the Northern Irish Troubles, Terry Brankin Has A Gun, is published by Merrion. His book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
See More: Brian Friel, Northern Ireland, Troubles
