A mischievous reader who prefers to remain nameless has suggested I could start an “interesting discussion” on the Irish terminology for cousins. Mind you, before typing “interesting discussion”, she typed “months-long impassioned row, possibly involving gunplay”, then drew a line through it.
She went on to say that in her own family, the issue has set off a lively debate (although again, she typed “blood feud” first). It could do the same among readers in general, she thinks: “But for god’s sake, leave my name out of it!”
Her curiosity arises from the mathematical formulation of family ties in Irish, whereby a first cousin is your colceathar, and more distant ones colcuigear, colseisear and so on: “So say there’s you, your mother, her brother and his daughter Emma, that’s four people and so you and Emma are colceathar. And if Emma has a son, you’d be his colcuigear. And so on.”
It was when using colseisear, to define the relationship involving her, her mother, her mother’s brother, the brother’s son, the son’s son, and the latter’s daughter, that she provoked family members to consult AI about this usage.
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AI claimed it arose from Brehon Law, and followed only male relatives. “The question is, what’s its usage in modern Irish?” she asks, wishing me good luck with the discussion and adding: “If you need to hide out for a while you can use the boxroom.”
Well, the first thing I had to do was remind myself of the meaning of col, which is “impediment”. And I can see how the implication that all your relatives are impediments of one kind or another is potentially controversial all right.
But the context for that, historically, was marriage, and the extent to which marriage was forbidden by degrees of consanguinity. Hence colceathar, an “impediment of four”, and so on.
And although I may be stumbling into a minefield here, this seems an admirably simple way to keep track. There are similar systems in English, where you have first and second cousins, or cousins “once removed”. In some places, I believe, you can still also be said to be “five-a-kin” and so on.
On a wider issue, meanwhile, searching for its roots sent me down a rabbit hole of Brehon marriage laws generally, thanks to Laurence Ginnell (1852–1923), a Parnellite MP and later TD who once wrote a book on the ancient legal system.
Ginnell was a lawyer by profession, a romantic nationalist by disposition. And he was somewhat scandalised by the implication of certain Brehon Laws that our heroic forebears had slack morals.
The laws accepted, for example, that a man might buy a wife, or just “abduct” one. And as with cousins, there were declining classes of spouse, from “a first lawful wife”, to “a first lawful adaltrach-woman” (the adjective means “adulterous”) and a third “adaltrach woman of abduction”.
Overall, marriage was “extremely loose”, Ginnell reported: “divorce was as easy, and could be obtained on as slight grounds, as is now the case in some of the states of the American Union.” He felt it necessary to conclude, however, that this did not reflect the reality of Irish life back then but rather the landmark cases with which law often concerns itself.
The “overwhelming evidence”, he wrote, “is that singular purity characterised the Irish in the past as in the present”. He concluded: “Probably all of the value that should be attached to law on this subject is that it marks the extreme limit of libertinism”.
Writing about the meteorological phenomenon of “scaraveens” earlier this week, I said that our late weather expert Brendan McWilliams never seemed to have mentioned the term. That was according to the spelling-sensitive Irish Times archive. But as I now know, thanks to John Murphy from Baldoyle, McWilliams did indeed mention the subject at least once, as scairbhín na gcuach.
John says he has been reading The Irish Times “since 1975” and this is his first time writing to us. In which circumstances, I consider it an honour to be so corrected.
In similar vein, that column also mentioned sceachs (whitethorn bushes/prickly people) and scallion eaters (Carlow GAA teams). And of the latter, I suggested in passing that they had “never done anyone much harm”.
This has provoked a mild rebuke from my friend John Kelly of that county, whose magisterial book on the history of GAA programmes has been a deserved bestseller. John, it turns out, has a brother nicknamed Sceach, not for being prickly but for a childhood habit of emerging in neighbours’ gardens via whitethorn hedges.
But the brother was also a noted scallion eater once. On which note, leaping to the defence of Carlow GAA, John reminds me of an era when my own native Monaghan was not the swaggering success story it is today.
He recalls a humbler time, 2004, when in a rare meeting between the counties, Carlow won. And not only did they win, but Monaghan’s total score that day (0-11) was equalled by a single Carlow sharpshooter: Brian “Sceach” Kelly.
Thanks for the memory, John. I stand suitably chastised.
