Founding feathers – Frank McNally on the surname Barnacle and other Irish oddities

Further to the "fossil history" of Irish surnames, and to anglicised versions that arose from mistranslation, a reader reminds me about the curious case of Barnacle. That unusual name is now known mainly because James Joyce married a member of the clan. But in her native Connacht, at least, Nora Barnacle was not unique in having it.

The original was Ó Cadhain, usually anglicised as Coyne, Kyne, or sometimes as the Jewish-looking Cohen or Coen. But in Irish, cadhan meant “wild goose”. So seeking an English translation, some Coynes made the leap – or flight – of imagination to a bird that, even before one of them married a great novelist – was much storied.

(Whether Joyce was deliberately playing on his wife’s surnominal confusion when he incorporated a real-life Dublin brothel owner called “Bella Cohen” into Ulysses, by the way, is a matter for another day’s diary.)

It may have been an influencing factor on the name’s adoption that the Barnacle goose loomed large in Irish culture, having both religious and dietary significance. For many centuries, it was a bird even devout Catholics could eat on Friday, or during Lent. This was because of a belief that it was not a bird at all, more of a fish.

Synonyms of the Fathers – Frank McNally on the complicated ‘fossil history’ of Irish surnames

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Boston wrangler – Frank McNally on Myles, Massachusetts, and Dropkick Murphy

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Shooting Boots – Frank McNally on how ‘the Monaghan Footballers’ of 1922 ended up in Hansard

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Like Brent geese, Barnacles spent only winters in Ireland, breeding and hatching their young elsewhere. You never saw a barnacle chick here: they arrived fully formed, off the sea. That and the similarity of their plumage to a certain shellfish that grows on ocean flotsam, gave rise to the idea that the two were intrinsically linked. Hence the Goose barnacle and the Barnacle goose.

The Welsh historian Giraldis Cambrensis, official apologist for the Norman invasion of Ireland, had no doubts. Writing in 1187, he declared that the geese “are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum. Afterwards they hang down by their beaks as if they were a seaweed attached to the timber, and are surrounded by shells . . . Having thus in process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they either fall into the water or fly freely away into the air . . . I have frequently seen, with my own eyes, more than a thousand of these small bodies, hanging down by the sea shore from one piece of timber...”

As long ago as 1215, while Cambrensis was still alive and confusing shells with feathers, Pope Innocent III ruled that the geese should not be eaten on Fridays or in Lent. But this took a while to catch on in Ireland, where belief in the birds’ exemption from bird status persisted into the 20th century.

When the Dáil debated a Game Preservation Bill in 1929, for example, one Mr Esmonde TD proposed an amendment to include wild geese. Partly this was a tribute their poetic associations with the Flight of the Earls. But according to Mr Esmonde they also had theological significance. As reported, he believed "the barnacle goose could, under ecclesiastical law, be eaten in the Kingdom of Kerry on Fridays", the only bird for which such permission existed.

Nor were Kerry Catholics alone in thinking themselves thus favoured. A papal exemption was also rumoured to have been given to the people of Derry, while the west of Ireland in general clung to the belief that the birds were fair game, Fridays or otherwise. In Kerry at least, even priests believed it. According to Kevin Danaher's The Year in Ireland (1972), "a well known hotel in Tralee" had until recent times served Brent goose during Lent, "mainly for the benefit of the clergy".

Changing the menu, for now, the hero of Nora Barnacle’s husband’s best known novel eats not a goose for breakfast but a kidney. A pork kidney, fortunately. Because thanks to another mistranslated name, some Kidneys in Ireland, including a former national rugby coach, are humans.

The original name there is Ó Dubháin, from a diminutive of dubh meaning black. Its many anglicised forms include Dwan, Duane, Devine, Down, and Downes. But duán being Irish for the aforementioned bodily organ, some families adopted that as the English version.

Then there is Ó Duibhne, usually anglicised as Deeny, Deeney, or (speaking of breakfast) Denny. The original is especially associated with Donegal, as is one of its eccentric offshoots, a name the genealogist Edward MacLysaght thought was “an example of one of the more absurd type of pseudo-translation”.

The rationale derived from phonetic similarity between Deeney and the Irish word daoine, but to add to that confusion, the accidental plural was further multiplied.

They say in Yorkshire that “there’s nowt so strange as folk”. But in the realm of Donegal surnames, there are few as strange as Peoples.