What is to be done about the great men with unsavoury views whose names festoon our streets?

The owners of the Westin Hotel in Dublin have decided not to proceed with renaming the hotel following “feedback”. The feedback seems to have centred on the fact that the proposed new name, The Westmoreland, was associated not just with the street on which it is located, but with a defender of the slave trade.

The decision followed one six weeks earlier by Trinity College Dublin to “dename” the Berkeley Library and dissociate it from slave-owning philosopher George Berkeley, who famously argued that “slaves would only become better slaves by being Christian”. It was subsequently pointed out to the owners of the hotel that John Fane, the 6th Earl of Westmorland – who gave the street its name – was an equally enthusiastic defender of slavery, condemning a Bill to abolish it as “hasty and unwise”. So now the hotel will be rebranded as the The College Green Hotel, which is both less offensive and less accurate, since its address is 35-39 Westmoreland Street.

Still, you can see the dilemma for anyone trying to come up with a name for a hotel, office block or housing estate in a country whose toponymy is indelibly stained by the fingerprints of a long line of great men with, if you dig beneath the surface, frequently problematic biographies – involving in some cases white supremacy, misogyny, abuse of women and children and, occasionally, slave owning. As Ronan McGreevy has written, David La Touche – who made a fortune in banking and the cloth trade, gave us Greystones and Marlay Park and lent his name to La Touche House in the IFSC – came from a family of slave owners.

[ Berkeley, Mitchel, Griffith: How far should ‘denaming’ go? ]

[ Trinity wanted to avoid sense of ‘winners and losers’ in renaming of Berkeley library ]

Fintan O’Toole has pointed out the myriad difficulties with the ongoing veneration of John Mitchel, hero of the revolutionary movement, fanatical Confederate and slavery superfan. He didn’t just quietly own slaves, he set up a newspaper to defend the cause and passionately argued against the idea “that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion”. There are at least seven GAA clubs dotted around the country still called after him. Then there’s the Sims fertility clinics, named after another great man, Dr James Marion Sims who, as Chris Fitzpatrick recently wrote, carried out brutal experiments on enslaved women.

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If you really want to keep going, Dr Kathleen Lynn – one of the pioneers of healthcare for women and children who was imprisoned for her role in the Rising – was the granddaughter of Rev Richard Wynne of Drumcliff, Co Sligo, who claimed compensation for the ownership of 30 slaves on Tortola island in the Caribbean. There is a proposal to name the new children’s hospital after her.

On the face of it, denaming buildings associated with the legacy of slavery shows a nuanced understanding of the evolution of history and a recognition that who we choose to honour is a reflection of the kind of society we want to be. Naming a building or a street or a bridge is a symbolic act; denaming it even more so.

But one of the troubles with the vogue for denaming is that it risks giving the impression we’re done with all that; that our worst crimes against one another and embarrassing ancestors are firmly behind us. Human progress isn’t linear. We haven’t arrived at an historical endpoint which gives us the ability to take a mile-high view, and box off our past crimes, mistakes and troublesome behaviours. We have no right to be smug about anything; just like the centuries-old figures who thought slavery was good for slaves, we are products of our time. Slavery is still a feature of our time; so are racism, misogyny, poverty, homelessness, protests against refugees. And we do know better.

[ Michael McDowell: Why stop with Berkeley? Cicero was a slave owner too ]

[ Westin Hotel’s renaming plan changed after link to slavery highlighted ]

While we grapple with that, what is to be done about the assorted slave owners, white supremacists, misogynists of the past whose names are linked to office blocks, streets, parks and even, in some cases, whole towns? These debates often fall into binary camps – you’re expected to be either in favour of renaming everything or to condemn it as a gross erasure of history. The answer, boringly, is that it needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

The Westin Hotel could have got away with explaining that the hotel was taking its name from the street, rather than from the slave owner, but why take the risk of offending the customers it’s trying to attract? The arguments for ripping Mitchel’s name from the signage of the GAA clubs which still celebrate him is more compelling again. The “retain and explain” approach TCD has taken with a stained-glass window featuring Berkeley seems to be a sensible middle ground where a work of artistic merit is at stake.

On the other hand, it would be reductive nonsense to suggest that the new children’s hospital shouldn’t be named after Dr Kathleen Lynn because her family had links with the slave trade. The good she has contributed in her own right – including establishing St Ultan’s Hospital – surely outweighs any wrongs done by her grandfather.

Here’s the trouble with dissociating ourselves from anything that ever brushed up against our darker history, especially in a country that has such a fraught and emotive history with placenames. We may end up with a collection of safe, meaningless, anodyne places, divorced from any vestiges of historical context. Remember those pre-Celtic Tiger ghost estates emblazoned with aspirational titles that got more and more florid and outlandish – the Tuscany Downses and Rousseau Groves and Kingsburys? It wasn’t until the crash came that a bit of bland “Seabrookfield” type reality was restored. The compromise reached since is a countryside dotted with entirely forgettable -hatches, -views and -fields. That’s why there are five estates called The Meadows in Limerick alone. Still you can see the planners’ point. Naming anything now is a real Minefieldhaven.