REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF VOLUME 40 OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY MEMOIRS
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MARY McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF VOLUME 40 OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY MEMOIRS OF IRELAND
oyalty to place is a curious, impenetrable thing. Why is it that young men wept yesterday when Galway won and Kildare lost. Why is it each summer we set off across fields in Co. Roscommon looking for the ruins of my great-grandmother’s house, following the vague signposts of memory. We Irish love place – we have little landscapes and confer on the smallest corner, a set of memories and stories wrapped up in a name – a lived landscape – an ordnance surveyor’s dream and nightmare.
As a child I was fascinated that a letter addressed to my grandfather simply at Caraward, Carrick-on-Shannon would have no difficulty finding him. My cousins two fields away lived at Boher, Carrick-on-Shannon – townlands marked and differentiated by hedges and ditches – each name a careful, protective testimony to the uniqueness of each place and the individuals in it. My own long city address lacked the resonances of memory, history and self-conscious identity. Somehow today’s identifying tag of postcode BT34 3BG doesn’t carry the same deep sense of place!
Over the last year – and especially during the election campaign - I have been through every county in Ireland and travelled many a road and laneway, meeting people in their own place, be it townland, village, town or city community. You very quickly become aware of the strong attachments and loyalties to place – of the bonds that exist between people and where they come from – of the influence that ‘place’ has on people - the sense of identity that people cling to and have pride in.
In the modern Ireland of today, that sense of identity takes on a new significance an antidote to globalisation and standardisation – a realisation that our own place is unique – that neither it nor the people in it can be standardised or made to conform to some theoretical model. Each place has its own characteristics – its own robust personality. Some of our great writers have drawn on their “own place” for inspiration. I am reminded of the words of Patrick Kavanagh, from his poem ‘Shancoduff’, the first poem I taught my own children because of its deep well of love for his own landscape.
“My hills hoard the bright shillings of March
While the sun searches in every pocket.
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves
In the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage”
And Paul Durcan in his poem ‘Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949’ describes travelling with his father to Mayo,
“Each town we passed through was another milestone
And their names were magic passwords into eternity”
The sense of ‘home’ passes from generation to generation. Again, Paul speaks of
“The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo,
And my father’s mother’s house, all oil-lamps and
women”
Haven’t we seen the parked coaches in Dublin’s Nassau Street awaiting the return of the many Irish American tourists who, with the smallest scrap of information – a surname from a headstone – a vague recollection of an aged or dead relative’s name – search for a clue to their origin in the Chief Herald’s Office on Kildare Street. And when their search turns up a name, a townland – perhaps a place which they might never get a chance to see – their palpable joy at finally knowing that they belong is immeasurable. They have found their own place. It has a name and the name carries a history. In far off Perth three weeks ago I unveiled a monument to the orphan girls shipped from Belfast to the New World, who became servants and wives in lives of awesome lonely drudgery. I met an old man whose great-grandmother was one of them. He had travelled thousands of miles to be there – all he knew was her name and her townland – another name on an Ordnance Survey Map – maps which take time and space to seek out and mark the contour of landscape and the imprint of the person.
Volume 40 of the Ordnance Survey “Memoirs of Ireland” which deals with the Counties of South Ulster in the period 1834 to 1838, is the last volume in the series – the first of which was published about ten years ago. The series is an invaluable source of material on Ireland just before the famine – just before the country was to change profoundly with mass emigration and the hemorrhage that lasted up until relatively recently.
The source for all of the material is the Royal Irish Academy, and I would like to commend the joint venture arrangement between the Academy and the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast who edited the material. I am aware that the Royal Irish Academy is currently working on a major project – a six volume Dictionary of Irish Biography to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2004 – covering in the region of 9,000 biographical entries on the lives of prominent Irish men and Women in all walks of life, north and south. I would like to avail of this opportunity to pay tribute to the general editors of the Dictionary – Prof. Aidan Clarke of TCD; Prof. Ronan Fanning of UCD; Professor Edith Johnston of the Ulster Heritage Foundation; Professor Maureen Murphy of Hofstra University, New York; and Managing Editor, James Maguire of UCD.
The Memoirs of Ireland – a collection of descriptions of locality and society initially designed to accompany the first Ordnance Survey maps – is of interest and tremendous use to the scholar, the half-scholar or just the dabbler. For those who know the locations, they will put flesh and blood onto the skeleton of their own history – they will fill in the detail on the sketch of family and community. They are fortunate to have such a marvellous resource – not just of facts and figures but intimate clues about the forces that shaped their own lives. For people who have an interest in or who are studying Irish history they are an invaluable source of information on location, natural features, natural history, topography and social economy.
Great credit is to the editorial work of Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams who have worked on all of the volumes and to Margaret McNulty the Editor of Publications and the Institute of Irish Studies.
I recommend the Memoirs as essential reading for anybody who wants to get behind the headlines – to look at the back of the big picture – to see how communities lived at a particularly interesting point on our history, to relish the relationship between landscape and person.