What's in a name? More than you'd think
For the first time in Ireland, a public space will be named after a female writer: the Irish writer Mary Lavin, an American-born Irish author considered a pioneer of ”women's writing”, a genre exploring the specific experience that women have of life and the world. This comes just after Ireland's most prestigious university, Trinity College Dublin, named one of its buildings after a woman – also a first: Eavan Boland, an Irish poet and author known for writing about Irish national identity and Irish women's role in history.
In Dublin, as elsewhere in Ireland, places named after people mostly have male names: only 3% of city centre streets honour women. This pattern replicates across the continent: less than 10% of European streets bear female names, according to the Mapping Diversity project. Today, many European cities try to compensate for the absence of women's names in geographic places.
In Ireland, renaming streets also comes with a postcolonial element. There are still a considerable number of streets, squares and statues that commemorate British history – a remnant of British rule of the island. Typically, many places in Dublin have their London counterparts (we have our own Camden!), and a lot of the streets named after women honour British monarchs Elizabeth and Victoria.
Of course, the core question is: why bother? I wonder about that myself sometimes. But considering that having a street named after you is probably one of the biggest privileges of a lifetime, it's worth thinking about who you want to hand out that privilege to. Naming a street or a park after someone is making them part of your city's history.
So, should we rename existing streets or be more aware of this inequality when naming new ones? In the first case, there are several levels of resistance. In Ireland, attempts at renaming streets have been called ”anti-British” or deemed unnecessarily confusing for locals. The argument usually is that no one thinks of the person behind the name anymore.