Names lose meaning as global swamps the local

THE folklorist Seamus O Cathain once told me a story that has stayed with me ever since. Years ago, collecting folklore in rural Wisconsin, in a community descended from 19th century Irish immigrants, he met a woman who told him about one of her childhood memories. When she was a girl, a neighbour had a single word written on the side of his barn.

To her, the word was a hieroglyph, letters and shapes without meaning. It had no known connotation or significance. Years later, when she was a grown woman, she visited Ireland.

There, by chance, she came across the word again Belmullet and realised for the first time that it was a place name. Only now did the letters that had stood on the side of that Wisconsin barn, forming a word without a meaning, a place name without a place, take on a content.

This story stuck because it seemed symbolic, a powerful metaphor for the effects of emigration on a culture, for the way places lose their meaning in a history like ours. But it was just that a metaphor.

The problem with Ireland, though, is that metaphors have a way of becoming literal. So it shouldn't be too surprising that this metaphor also has become a reality, that it has started to operate at the level of money and power as well as that of memory and culture.

LAST month the incoming chief executive of Waterford Crystal, Redmond O'Donoghue, announced that one of his principal strategies would be to "use the brand name to sell quality non crystal products". Very shortly, Waterford intends to launch Waterford linen on the American market.

It is using a leapfrog manoeuvre familiar in the annals of marketing using a brand name that has a good reputation for one kind of product to promote a different but compatible product. And the names do seem to go together well. Waterford crystal is famous for its quality. So is Irish linen.

The twist, though, is that the linen will not be Irish. It will be produced in the Philippines, China and Belgium, exported to the US from those countries and sold under the label Waterford.

In marketing terms, Waterford is no longer a city of 40,000 people in the southeast of Ireland but a corporate emblem with no geographical reference pot. It is a brand name, not a place name. It signifies a set of products not a community or even a factory. It bears the same relationship to a real place as the Belmullet on the Wisconsin barn does to the town in Mayo.

It is useless to try to interpret this development, which is typical of globalisation within the frame of the economic nationalism of the 1930s or 1950s.

For one thing it is worth hearing in mind that the word Waterford the magic word whose utterance will transform Chinese linen into a premium product is itself derived from the Old Norse Vedrarfjordr, a windy fjord.

And for another, Waterford Crystal owes its existence to economic displacement, in the form of the skills of the refugee Czech glass makers who revived a craft that had been dormant in the city for nearly a century.

Economic globalisation is a fact of life and a return to any kind of protectionism is simply impossible. But the impossibility of stopping the clock doesn't mean that you can't tell the time. We need to understand what is happening, what is wrong with it and what we can do about it.

What has happened to Waterford is a powerful indicator of the real connection between the image of a country on the one hand and its economic power on the other. A few years ago when Waterford Crystal was in crisis, the company commissioned research in its main market, the US. The question it wanted answered was a simple one did Americans know that Waterford was in Ireland? The answer was crucial.

If it was yes, then it would be very difficult to sell say, Polish or Czech crystal as Waterford. In that case, the Waterford workers, and the city itself, would have a real hold over the company's main asset, its brand name. If the answer was no, the company would have a new kind of power, the power to shift production to eastern Europe with out affecting its brand image in the US.

The answer hardly a surprising one, given that many Americans think that Brazil is in Asia was that most Americans had no idea that Waterford was in Ireland. Waterford was able to give its workers an ultimatum swallow unpalatable changes or the company will leave Ireland. And the company was free to break the link between its name and the place that name describes, as it is now doing with its Chinese linen.

THIS kind of power is typical of a world in which 358 individuals have combined fortune equivalent to the annual income of another 2.4 billion individuals, and in which 37,000 multinational companies control a third of global productive assets while employing less than 5 per cent of the world's labour force.

It is typical of a global economy in which the power of national governments, particularly small ones like ours, to control their own economies is virtually non existent. We can either stand back in helpless awe at that power to turn the complex stuff of history and geography into brand names, or we can start to think about how to cope with it.

One of the most obvious things we need to think about is the image of Ireland that we sell into the international marketplace, sometimes at enormous expense to ourselves.

Often those very images actively encourage ignorance about Ireland as a creator of industrial products, so that Americans who like Waterford Crystal can't imagine that it is actually connected to a place of ruined castles, crashing waves and romantic hills.

But we also need to think carefully about our own failure to give real political and economic content to the sense of place that we take for granted. One of the paradoxes of Irish life is that we talk all the time about local attachments, about the importance of place in our culture, but then refuse to give any real political meaning to the local dimension of our lives.

Local government is less important and less powerful in Ireland than in any other western European country. We refuse to make our places more than place names by allowing them to develop the political substance that might allow them to react to global forces.

In doing so, we encourage the process of making them into free floating corporate symbols without ties to history or geography and therefore without responsibility to people.