This review first appeared in The Andersonstown News
John Creedon has a breezy voice and a hearty manner (CREEDON’S ATLAS IRELAND, RTÉ ONE) .“I’m following in the footsteps of Ireland’s first place-name officer, John O’Donovan!” he tells us. O’Donovan got together names of over 64,000 townlands and in that way “handed us the keys to Ireland’s past.” John promises us that his exploration will provide a clue not just about the past “but the future of that place we call home”.
He starts with the name of Ireland, which was originally Íweriú (the Abundant One), then Éire, then Ireland.
John heads for the GPO, where he meets up with Prof Diarmuid Ferriter. After the 26 counties got independence, the new state was known as Saorstat Eireann – the Irish Free State. In the 1948 Olympics there was some dispute over the flag that should be flown and the name of the athlete’s country.
The following year, 1949, the twenty-six counties became a republic.
Fintan O’Toole tells John that there were three words which journalists working in The Irish Times had to look out for: state, country, nation. Fintan is confident we are learning to handle hyphenated Irish – Nigerian-Irish, Polish-Irish, unionist-Irish. Change is coming, Fintan believes. Some 18% pf people now living in the south weren’t born there, so we have to be inclusive.
Then John talked to Ardal O’Hanlon about 1985 and those moving statues. Ardal says he watched at the Ballinspittle grotto, and around twilight the statue definitely seemed to move – but he put it down to a trick of the light rather than supernatural intervention. There was, he reminded John, 29% unemployment then, “and there was nothing good on the telly, so naturally people looked to other sources. “You see what you want to see”.
Then John checked out Ballinspittle itself – the Place of the Hospital in its original Irish form. It was a place where people suffering from leprosy and various skin afflictions came. There were holy wells all over Ireland, many pre-dating Christianity. People weren’t particularly hygienic in those days, so to wash in the well’s water could do you a power of good. Prof Luke Kelly of Trinity was called in. He’d had the water in the holy well analysed, and there was good news and bad news. Good news: the water was soft, which helps the skin; the bad news was that it contained sewage. “Would you drink it?” John wants to know. “Eh- not today” Luke says. “I wouldn’t put my elbow in there”. Ardal says.
So many of these touring-around-countries-and-regions programmes depend on two things: the presenter and his/her discoveries. John Creedon. is a pleasant man, but sometimes he’s a bit too breezy, and his programme too stuffed with places and pundits. Be more selective, John – but make sure to keep the likes of Ardal O’Hanlon on hand. That line about his elbow and the water from the holy well lifts a programme from the dreary recitation of facts.
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