Names of Irish towns

It was still called Maryborough for a long time post 1922.

Rathluirc is an example of a renaming attempt that failed to stick, likewise Muine Bheag.

The OP should take a chill pill.

Regarding Queenstown/Cove/Cobh. What was the original name before it was Cove, Queenstown or Cobh? Or did it even have a name before then? I'm just asking as there is no letter 'V' in the Irish language.

Very clear and precise explanation Peregrinus, thank you. It does seem that the OP is right that Cove was changed to sound 'more Irish' (Cobh), especially since the séimhiú was consigned to history. But surely that's been going on a lot since then. I often think a lot of the Irish language has been 'made up' due to the fact that there just aren't enough words to speak it fluently with the modern language we use today. I wonder how other languages have coped. I think this has been discussed on Boards before but I'll never find it I'm sure. I quite like Ballyvoloon.

Maam/Maam Cross

An Teach Doite is the Irish name of Maam Cross, which is a different place from Maam.

Maam (An Mám) is a village in Connemara. It lies at the south end of the Maam valley, which runs north and west towards Leenane. Both the valley and the village are named from the Irish word mám, a mountain pass.

Maam Cross is about 8 km south of Maam. It's a junction on the Galway to Clifden road. It gets its name because it's where you would turn off if you were going to Maam.

A name like Maam Cross (or Limerick Junction, another example) never originates with the inhabitants of the locality. Names of this kind are conferred by outsiders, who only consider the place in the context of its relationship to somewhere else that is of more interest to them. The inhabitants of Maam Cross most likely did call it An Teach Doite; it was probably people passing through from Galway who started to call it Maam Cross.

Dublin

For a related example of a place having different names in Irish and in English, the city of Dublin takes its English name originally from two Irish words, dubh (black) and linn (pool). This refers to a now-drained pool of the River Poddle which was just south of Dublin Castle.

An Irish speaker would put these words in the opposite order, the noun first and then the adjective - linn dubh, a black pool. The adjective-noun order is Norse.

The Viking settlement of Dublin had a mixed Norse and Irish population, whose languages influenced one another. Dubh linn comes either from Norse speakers borrowing Irish words but joining them in a Norse way, or from Irish speakers, joining words in a Norse way under the influence of their Norse neighbours (or possibly their Norse masters; Dublin was a slave market).

Meanwhile the wild (but free) Irish living in the mountains south of the city had their own name for the settlement: Baile Átha Cliath, the town of the ford of hurdles. This refers to a ford across the Liffey which was a little way upstream from (and was probably older than) the Viking settlement.

Both names are authentic. They were used by different communities to refer to the same place. The Irish-speaking community within the city of Dublin disappeared fairly early on, so all Irish-speakers used Baile Átha Cliath. But it left its influence on the Norse and, in time, English name of the city.

Councils in Northern Ireland (or, for that matter, in the Republic) have no power to rename their cities, districts, etc. Local government entities are established and named by national law, not by local bye-laws. In NI cities are usually established and named by royal charter.

So, if the city council wanted the city to be officially renamed "Derry", the way to do that would be to petition the King (or Queen, as it was at the time) to grant a new royal charter conferring that name. The monarch would, if so advised by the relevant government minister, grant the charter, and Bob's your uncle. But of course petitioning his gracious majesty for a royal charter is not a very republican thing to do, is it? Not a good look. So, instead, the Council changed its own name, which it had power to do all on its own without any humble petition for the monarch's gracious act. For good measure, they also changed the name of the airport serving the city, which they owned.

I wasn't aware that there was a court case about this (but that doesn't mean there wasn't one).

Dunno if it was me who posted about this before but, yeah, this is correct. Leixlip was a Viking settlement — you could take a longship up the Liffey that far — and was named for a natural weir (which presumably was the barrier to taking the longships any further).

The Irish name, Léim an Bhradáin, is a direct translation of the Norse name. It's a much newer name, though — it's not recorded before the nineteenth century.

The Leix- in Leixlip is cognate with lax, as in gravlax, the Scandinavian dish of cured salmon with dill, and lox, as in bagels and lox, as found in kosher delicatessens all over the world. It has nothing at all to do with Leix, the now-obsolete anglicisation of Laois

I'd say the Londonderry/Derry names are so engrained almost as a form of identity any new renaming attempt would be ignored by both sides of the name debate. People usually don't like being told what to do by outsiders, see Dingle debacle.

What part of mountmellick are u claiming offaly streched to the kilcavan football club area of mountmellick parish would have being in an offaly parish originally. The people that live there also don't really consider them laois people (not in a gaa perspective anyway).

Mountmellick is only a parish made up much later taken from several other parishes cause population got to big.

A lot of people were slaughtered to create counties, an English invention based on Shires, but there's no talk of abolishing counties. In fact we are fiercely wedded to them.