HENRY

James Harkin in The Guardian talks about overthrowing the ‘yoke of ethnicity’:

Dingle, for those of you who haven’t been, is a remote but justly admired fishing port in Ireland. In a referendum held earlier today, its residents voted overwhelming to readopt its English name and save it from the imposition of the Irish placename, An Daingean. In the ballot, 1,005 people voted for Dingle and a mere 70 against. In an era in which democracy has lost much of its lustre, the ballot drew a massive response of 89.6%.

The local council had already begun replacing road signs bearing the word Dingle, but the residents found the name-change confusing and want to go back to living in plain old Dingle. The context for all this is potentially embarrassing to the Irish authorities. It defies the edict of the minister for rural, Gaeltacht and community affairs, for one thing, and comes amid plans for Irish to be tarted up as an official EU language next year.

Posted on August 5th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill