IN 60 years’ time, Irish old age pensioners will be called Tyler and Amber, Dylan and Ruby. Even Madison will not raise an eyebrow when she goes to collect her bus pass.
A first name says little about the child but a lot about the parents and the society they were born into. The names of saints who once occupied an important place in Irish Catholic society and were invoked and venerated in daily life: Vincent, Agnes, Philomena, Gerard, Teresa, Bernadette, Francis Xavier are no longer names given to newborns.
Times have changed. In 1911 there was not a single Cian, Alannah, Oisin, Saoirse or Aisling on the census. The only Fionn registered is a member of the Church of Ireland just like the founder of the Gaelic League himself: Dubhghlas de hÍde.
Nevertheless Irish saints names already featured heavily: Bridget, Patrick, Lawrence, Kevin, Malachy, Dymphna and Aidan.
In the aftermath of the Famine, the clergy’s grip on the congregations tightened and people started attending Mass regularly and in their droves. John McGahern spoke for many people when he described the way of life he remembered from his childhood in Co Leitrim in the 1930s and 1940s: “Prayers were said each morning. Work and talk stopped in fields and house and school and shop and the busy street at the first sound of the Angelus bell each day at noon. Every day was closed with the rosary at night. The worlds to come, hell and heaven and purgatory and limbo, were closer and far more real than America or Australia and talked about almost daily as our future reality”.
Following the Education Act of 1892 making primary education compulsory, most Catholic boys and girls were being taught about their faith at schools run by religious orders. Confraternities and sodalities sprang up throughout the country and alongside the church they became the centres for Catholic social life.
Mary was and continued to be the most common name in the country and its usage grew in the 20th century with variations of the name gaining ground – such as Marie, Maria, Maire, Maureen, Carmel, Dolores, Miriam and Marian. It remained this way right up until the 1970s when Gabriel Mary Byrne ruled the screen and the airwaves, John Mary Lynch the Dáil and Eamonn Mary Barnes the DPP.
Sigmund Freud compared the cult of the Virgin Mary to the cult of the classical mother goddess Artemis/Diana in his essay “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” (1911). If Mary was the equivalent of Diana, the angels and saints took the place of the other classical heroes and they were just as revered.
In the early 19th century all that was known about Philomena was that she was a martyr. However, when her relics were stored in a shrine in Mugnano, Italy, miracles started taking place. She was the first saint canonised on the basis of miraculous intercession alone. Pope Pius IX named her patroness of the Children of Mary. Pope Leo XIII approved the Confraternity of St Philomena. Pope Pius X raised it to a Universal Archconfraternity.
She became patroness of the rosary. There is a novena to her. For a time, she was arguably the second most venerated woman in Irish Catholicism until Pope Paul VI had her day taken off the liturgical calendar just before Vatican II.
The saints who had actually witnessed apparitions took centre stage. The devotion to Bernadette, the miller’s daughter to whom the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in 1859 in Lourdes grew when she was canonised in 1933.
Jacinta was one of the Portuguese shepherdesses to whom Mary appeared at Fatima and who died soon after the first World War in the flu epidemic.
Teresa was much given and the popularity of the name was compounded by the fact that there were two of them – Teresa of Avila and the Little Flower of Lisieux.
Saints were associated with specific religious orders. The Redemptorists gave us St Gerard Magella. Gemma was a Passionist saint, Angela an Ursuline, Rita an Augustinian nun and Blessed Imelda, the patron saint of a fervent Holy Communion was associated with the Dominicans. Jesuit names included Aloysius, Ignatius and Francis Xavier. Colette is associated with the enclosed Franciscan order the Poor Clares. But some names popular in Ireland need very little explanation: Vincent (de Paul), Joan (of Arc) or Francis (of Assisi).
Madison Malone is unlikely to own rosary beads or knit or drink tea from a teapot. Her grandchildren will undoubtedly find her quaint and laugh when she uses old-fashioned expressions like “Come on you guys, take a chill pill” and “that’s like not ok” and somewhere along the line one of her grandchildren will work out why she was called after a street in New York City.