The Irish Times view on place-names: the word on the street

At a Dublin City Council committee meeting this week, Independent councillor Christy Burke bemoaned that developers were giving names to new housing and office blocks that were disconnected from the history, culture or identity of their localities. "I'm sick and tired of looking at 'Blossom Way' developments and no connection to the area at all," Burke said. Instead of allowing builders to select names "on the hoof", he said, local historians should be involved.

The naming of a place – a town, a street, a housing estate – is of course a profoundly political act. In Brian Friel's masterpiece, Translations, the Ordnance Survey's mapping of Ireland in the 19th century – and with it the replacement of original Irish place-names with the meaningless English transliterations that remain in use today – stands for the enforced remapping of the Irish mental landscape. Bun na hAbhann, mouth of the river, became Burnfoot. At least such mangling was deliberate. Last year, Kerry County Council was left embarrassed when a new housing estate in Dingle was given the name Pairceanna na Glas, which is gibberish.

Across the world, governments and city authorities grapple with the politics of whether to change street names to reflect modern sensibilities or simply to leave them alone as artefacts of their time. Street-names in Dublin and other Irish towns have changed less than many nationalists desired in the years after independence; the map of the capital today is dominated by the names of developers, royals, battles, revolutionaries and artists. The paucity of women's names on that map shows why the city should be open to change. As those changes accrete over time, they tell a rich story. Even the particular form of bland, aspirational names that developers gave to housing estates in the last two decades – Tiffany Downs, Sussex Grove and the like – offer a social-cultural snapshot that is worth preserving. The urban map should be a palimpsest, each layer capturing its own moment and its preoccupations. On that map, even Blossom Way has its place.