There are two naming events for every child. When the child is born everyone wants to know, “Have you got a name yet?” So there’s the official naming decision to be made. And you don’t want to screw it up. The kid is going to live with this name the rest of their life.
Once the official name is settled on another chapter of naming begins. Nicknames, pet names, joke names. The first weeks of my daughter’s life gave birth to an abundance of pet names. This phase of naming is much more of a free jazz improv type of affair. Some pet names are a grasping attempt to capture the overwhelming love and affection you feel for this tiny soft creature. Some names are for fun. And some names are devised for no other reason than to try to make your other half laugh as you’re both cleaning up poo – again – at 4am.
It was in the midst of the delirium and sleep deprivation of those first few weeks that John playfully referred to Méabh as a ‘plastic Paddy’. He saw the look on my face. “That’s ok to say, right?”
“No. That’s definitely not cool. Even as a joke. We won’t be calling her that,” I replied.
“Lots of the kids I went to school with whose parents were Irish referred to themselves as plastic Paddies,” John said. And so ensued a days long exploration around the term and the term ‘Paddy’ in general. We took it to the family WhatsApp group. It’s a slur, we could all agree on that. But just how bad is it? Definitions of racism were shared. Discussions of power dynamics took place.
When I registered with my doctor the box I ticked on the form under ethnicity read, ‘White Irish’. When I first saw the classifications I was surprised there was such a specific box for me. The older I get the more it makes sense to me.
Starting my geology degree in London was the first time I had the experience of my Irishness being novel to the people around me. When they saw me coming down the hallway some of the jock-ier types would shout “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!” in an exaggerated Irish accent. I laughed it off in good humour. Never once pushing back. Never once pointing out the accent they were attempting was from a completely different part of the country to me.
I don’t drink, never have, so the most common thing I heard said through my uni years was, “An Irish person who doesn’t drink? I didn’t think that was possible!” I would laugh and join in, “I don’t need to drink, sure it’s in my blood already.”
It wasn’t until years later that I began to clearly see some of the dynamics of the culture I was now living in and how my Irishness was treated. Postwar and into the sixties it was not uncommon for signs for accommodations around London to read, ‘No Blacks. No dogs. No Irish.’ A friend of Irish descent used to work for a big UK high street fashion retailer. Their Irish stores were listed on the website under the territory name ‘Southern Ireland’. As in, the opposite of Northern Ireland. My friend had to explain to the web team that the country was actually called the Republic of Ireland.
It’s only really been in recent years that I’ve realised how much I’ve played along with stereotypes and chose to make people feel comfortable rather than shed light on ignorance. Cultural forces are a lot like geological forces. As you read this, Europe and North America are moving away from each other at a rate of about an inch a year. For the past 55 million years the Indian plate has been slow-motion smashing into the Eurasian plate, creating the Himalayas, which continue to rise by about a fifth of an inch a year. The scale of these forces and the timescales involved in shaping the world around us are too big to comprehend. But whether we perceive them or not, we are moulded by them. We can’t not be.
